Meet Heli Holttinen, Co-Founder at Research-Tech Company: Cambri

Tell us about Cambri

Cambri is a Global research-tech company, launched in 2018 and founded in order to solve one of the most wasteful parts of the CPG/FMCG industry – failed new product launches. Through consistent iterative testing and AI technology, embedded into the platform, it means we are engineering success rates of new product launches towards the goal of a 95% success rather than the currently reported 95% failure rate.

Whilst our Nordic roots remain with our R&D centre in Helsinki, we have commercial hubs across Europe and the US.

How did you come up with the idea for Cambri?

I started Cambri simply because I saw huge customer pain that was not being addressed and therefore represented a real business opportunity. The majority of product launches fail because traditional market research wasn’t doing a good enough job of helping consumer brands bring new products successfully to market.

I knew that with the help of modern technology and AI, Cambri could become the positive change agent needed to change the status quo and revolutionise innovation success rates. On a personal level, I felt starting a new company, with a clear vision and mission, was an exciting learning opportunity and journey.

How has Cambri evolved over the last couple of years?

Cambri has grown very quickly in the last few years. What started as a great idea, a handful of people with boot-strapped technology is now a multinational company, with ten times more people, a kick ass platform and a collection of stellar household brands as customers; Carlsberg, Coca-Cola, Electrolux, Nestle and Danone.

Cambri is now re-writing the way consumer brands approach NPD, by offering a more iterative, consumer focussed and data-led approach to innovation. By leveraging the power of AI, Cambri transforms innovation success rates from the market average rate of 5 – 25% to a confident 73%.

New product development is no longer about taking a leap of faith. Companies can now test early and test often to determine if a new product will be successful. Launch AI™ includes Launch AI™ ‘Predict’ and Launch AI™ ‘Advise’. Launch AI™ ‘Predict’ generates a score to indicate if your NPD concept will be successful or not, using a robust data set combining survey data with post launch data. This gives a much higher success prediction accuracy than traditional KPIs that have been the industry standard until now. Launch AI™ ‘Advise’ offers suggestions on how to improve the NPD concept with an AI-generated summary of the key strengths and the weaknesses of the concepts as well as sources of uniqueness.

Launch AI™ will generate new and improved value propositions, based on respondent feedback on strengths and weaknesses. The deep survey data together with post launch data gives a much higher success prediction accuracy than traditional KPIs that have been the industry standard until now.

At the end of 2023 we launched in the US, and we have a very busy year ahead as global CPG brands are understanding the huge impact the Cambri platform can have on their innovation process.

What can we hope to see from Cambri in the future?

Our vision and enduring purpose remains the same. We will continue to co-create solutions with our customers to help eradicate the volume of failed launches enabling them to have a positive and lasting impact on this planet by producing less waste and producing products that make consumers happy. And, of course, at the same time ensuring our customers’ brands enjoy sustainable growth and profits.

We’ll continue to double down on investment in R&D and hire smart people to push us closer towards our end goal.

Our ambition is to drive greater innovation success by guiding our users through every phase of the innovation process. Our Launch AI™ model will act as a co-pilot, offering prescriptive advice to shape and improve the development of new products.  We’ll continue to leverage AI to surface the learnings from previous launches as well as feedback from target consumers. The end goal is ultimately to test, tune, and nail NPD.