OCCO is a DesignTech startup with a mission to digitalise the world of interior design. We are building an AI-Powered platform for design professionals that changes the way they source furniture. The B2B sales process is entirely different from regular B2C commerce. To this day, the industry primarily uses paper catalogues, exchanging numerous e-mails to get the necessary product information, sending out pdf offers etc. This takes up valuable time that could be used for creative work instead. We are here to change it.
Our platform gives the professionals direct access to manufacturers, trade pricing, and product’s technical files. Our AI uses deep learning, which is state of the art for analysing product images and descriptions. We have custom trained our computer vision algorithms on a large dataset of interior products and use natural language processing to make product descriptions searchable.
This means our platform is the best in the world for finding interior products and discovering alternative products in just seconds. Together with all the additional project management features, our platform has proven to save on average 27% of working time for interior design professionals. That’s nearly a week every month – a game-changer for busy offices.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
We have been in the business for six years and have experienced all the industry shortcomings first hand. OCCO started as a project sales company in 2016. We worked closely with architects, real estate developers and B2B customers and have done all the time-consuming manual work ourselves.
We knew there must be a better way, and we started to create a digital solution to simplify our work. Soon we realised that we could make the interior design process and project management much more straightforward and effective for the entire industry. OCCO’s platform came to life in close collaboration with over 150 interior architects from different European countries. Their feedback and suggestions led us to create the platform in the first place. Having deep industry knowledge, close connections with interior architects and hands-on experience with the sales process gives us a strong advantage in our ambition to digitalise the furniture industry.
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How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
Since founding OCCO, we have doubled our revenue every year. During the pandemic, our revenue grew more than two and a half times to seven million EUR.
Today, we are glad that over 250 interior design professionals use our platform in their daily work, and the number keeps growing fast. The pandemic sped up the process of digital transformation.
With all the cancelled trade fairs and events, the design professionals and manufacturers have been more willing to move online and see our platform’s value and potential. It takes only 30 seconds to create the account, and you have everything you need available to create and manage your projects. We have grown our international team to 54 people and have offices in Tallinn and Amsterdam.
What can we hope to see from OCCO in the future?
We have an ambitious plan to establish a solid user base in 10 countries in Europe within the next two years. We raised a minimum amount of funds needed to take us to the next level with the seed round. We are now preparing for the Series A funding round to support our further development and scaling, with plans to launch it in the second half of 2022.
Our experienced team is committed to continuously developing the product and adding features and functionality based on daily feedback from users. User experience is of paramount importance to us, and we need to earn user satisfaction every day.
