Car Rental Dynamic Pricing Platform Open to Public

Perfect Price, the company using AI to make pricing and revenue management effortless for businesses worldwide, today announced the public availability of its flagship dynamic pricing platform.

The Perfect Price platform, previously in beta, uses a combination of machine learning and big data analysis to anticipate the prices consumers are willing to pay for specific goods and services at any given moment in time — taking into account a wide variety of marketplace conditions and consumer behaviors that affect supply and demand — and automatically optimizes prices accordingly in real time to maximize a company’s revenue performance.

Building on top of early success with consumer name brands, the company also announced that it has secured $5.8 million in seed funding to date and will use the capital to open a new Oakland, Calif., headquarters and scale its engineering, operations, and go-to-market teams.

The company anticipates quadrupling in size by the end of 2019.

Investors include leaders in enterprise SaaS technology including Steven Tamm, chief technology officer at Salesforce; Erik Eccles, CEO of UrbanDoor and former CEO and founder of Versly (acquired by Cisco); Dustin Robertson, chief marketing officer at Drip.com and founding chief marketing officer of Backcountry.com; and several others.

Effortless Pricing: Leveraging AI to Achieve the Perfect Price

Dynamic pricing represents a radical departure from the traditional method for setting prices, which relies on large teams conducting painstaking manual analysis to understand the prices that consumers will pay for products or services and setting prices or business rules accordingly.

The explosion of digital commerce, and the massive amounts of data it produces makes traditional methods untenable. Every unsold or sold out hotel, flight, or rental car counter stands as testament to the inadequacy of legacy approaches in a rapidly-changing omnichannel marketplace.

Dynamic pricing involves processing multiple streams of data derived from any number of product, supply, location, customer, and external data points and adjusting to these changes in real time to reflect the perfect price for the given marketplace at that moment. Dynamic pricing is unique because it learns from data rather than relying on legacy pricing rules, linear programming, or other less scalable methods. Instead, users simply set key parameters and the dynamic pricing AI will develop and implement complex strategies on its own, continuously adjusting prices by the millions across any number of products.

According to recent data from Gartner, a leading industry analyst firm, the price optimization software market grew to $318 million in 2017 driven by strong business demand. The firm found that about 750 companies had deployed pricing software by the end of 2017, a 37% increase compared with 2016, but as many as 10,000 businesses globally would benefit from a price optimization solution.

Gartner research finds that the factors driving demand for pricing solutions include rapid return on investment (often less than six months); the simplicity, usability, and cost savings afforded by cloud deployment; and interest in leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to create business value.

Perfect Price empowers companies to:

• Effortlessly manage prices and meet or exceed revenue goals — Revenue managers simply set Perfect Price to meet a certain revenue goal and the dynamic pricing AI does the rest: digesting millions or billions of marketplace data points to accurately predict and set the perfect price to meet those goals. The Perfect Price platform is the first of its kind to incorporate internal historical sales data, inventory availability, and a number of external marketplace inputs to offer a complete and precise picture of demand.
• Gain competitive advantage — Perfect Price arms businesses with previously unattainable visibility into competitor pricing and marketplace data, in real time, enabling them to better anticipate competitor moves.
• Create accurate, data-driven forecasts and simulations — The Perfect Price platform continuously learns and improves from transactional data. By using the latest simulation methodologies, the AI can predict not only consumer actions but also competitor pricing moves and availability, enabling businesses to make better decisions.