Luca is a startup that has developed tools for retailers to help them optimize prices and make accurate pricing predictions at a large scale. Recently, Luca closed a $2.5 million seed round funded by Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator (of which Luca was a part of the Winter 2023 cohort) Soma Capital, and several angel investors. Co-founders Tanvi Surti and Yonah Mann, both formerly employed by Uber’s dynamic pricing team, created Luca as a tool to provide retail pricing teams with the data and insights they need to maximize their revenue and margin growth.
Luca’s platform employs AI to monitor sales and inventory data, market trends, and competitor prices to suggest price adjustments that enable retailers to reach their desired goals. Mann shared with TechCrunch that Luca’s software is “not a dynamic pricing company” but rather a tool to aid human decision-makers by transforming a large quantity of information into “clear recommendations”. Luca has already worked with 8 brands, two of them being Fortune 500 companies. The funding will be used for team expansion in the areas of engineering and data science.
Luca was founded by Tanvi Surti and Yonah Mann. While working in the dynamic pricing team of Uber, Mann was in charge of the unit economics of Uber Eats and Surti was leading the UberPool Pricing group. Mann told TechCrunch that the business was not thriving and Surti and him worked together to rebuild the pricing algorithm, resulting in a remarkable improvement.
Founded in 2021, Luca is one of many pricing optimization and planning startups. Pricefx, one of the most successful ones, has raised millions in funding for its algorithmic pricing software while Fetcherr, with focus on airline-related pricing adjustments, recently closed a $12.5 million equity investment.
With an ever-growing pressure over retail industry, pricing strategy is an incredibly important factor to consider. Luca’s technology might just be the key to unlock retailers’ profit potential.
