Renable featured in Scandinavia’s leading scale-up news site: Breakit.se

Leif Sundström and Fredrik Engdahl, Founders of re:nable

The below text is a translation of the original article (in Swedish).

Long before ChatGPT came along, there was a Gothenburg company that started solving e-commerce companies’ problems with the help of AI-based marketing. With SEK 30 million behind it, Renable is gearing up internationally.

“We are unique globally, we can now put the pedal to the metal.“

Today, it’s common for companies to spend around 60 percent of their marketing budget on brand building communication and 40 percent on converting customers digitally through online ads.

But, with large product catalogues and considering all the ad networks in which you have to have a presence, the complexity quickly becomes unmanageable. An e-commerce company simply cannot handle thousands of products and ads at each given moment.

The Gothenburg-based company Renable claims to solve the problem with the help of its Al "Aimee". They have built a system that aggregates, processes and generatse large amounts of product-level data and content, which they can leverage for detailed ad production at scale. During its five years of existance, Aimee has been trained on hundreds of millions of ads.

"We enable the generation of more relevant and content rich ads. Ads can contain more descriptive product information, UGC in the form of a user video, or expert review content from authority publications. Any content type that increases consumers’ feeling of trust is requested" says CEO Leif Sundström, who together with Fredrik Engdahl founded the company in 2018.

Examples of ads that can be generated by Renable.

"Until about 18 months ago, we worked exclusively with the CE industry, as it was a natural fit for us, considering our capabilities and consumers’ expectation of product content in the form of UGC and authority reviews within that segment. We have since entered several other segments such as e-commerce for building materials, lamps and pet food."

Past investments in Renable currently amount to around SEK 30 million, mainly from angel investors. Among the owners are Jonas Bonde (Prisjakt, Car.info), Daniel Johnsson (Captech/Exertis, Inet, Fractal) and Christopher Engman and Anna Engman (Megadeals, Minestorage, InZynk, Lex24/7, Climeon). But, according to Leif Sundström, the company will likely need more, considering that size of the market. "With our existing capital, we can reach a positive cash flow, but if we want to accelerate faster, we may need more."

Chat GPT helps

The company, which has ten employees, two of whom are developers, had a turnover of just over SEK 6 million last year. The result has so far been in the red, but we expect to reach break-even this summer.

"As important as it is to throttle, we have to grow with control."

Have you seen a big boost for your service with Chat GPT?

"We have enjoyed a solid head start, as we started out early. As Chat GPT has commoditized Generative AI, companies are now starting to consider how they can apply it to their businesses. It's great for us and a driver in the whole industry."

Quality assurance is very important in advertisements, does you Al also do that?

"Yes. Chat GPT is one example of an AI model that suffers from this problem, which also makes it less useful for uncontrolled large scale ad content generation. For instance, refrigerators come with specific energy classes, and if Chat GPT is given the task of writing natural product descriptions from specifications, it might well mention that the refrigerator has 'energy class A' when it's in fact something else. Then you need a human to perform fact-checking. That doesn’t work for large product catalogues. Automated fact checking is a feature with our Aimee."

How do you develop the service going forward?

"We will launch support for additional ad platforms and content types, as well as continue to add more user generated content, as we see that the video format is what works best right now."

What kind of challenges do you see then?

"To scale and to find employees with the right competences, and do that in the best way possible. The goal is to launch in Europe and beyond. We already have some smaller customers outside the Nordics," says Leif Sundström.