Omnilytics, Singapore’s fashion analytics firm acquires Malaysia’s AI startup, Supahands in a $20 million deal

Singapore-based Omnilytics that provides actionable insights for fashion retailers is set to acquire Supahands a Malaysia-based data labelling platform for $20 million. According to Omnilytic’s CEO and co-founder, Kendrick Wong, this acquisition would help them fill a gap in their technical offerings for retail firms.

According to company sources, Supahands CEO and co-founder Mark Koh will be joining the Omnilytics board and will serve as the chief strategy officer.

Omnilytics provides retailers with deep and actionable insights empowering them to make decisions through its market intelligence platform. The retail-insights platform of the company provides real-time competitor analysis and data for fashion retailers. According to the company, it claims to have gathered data from more than 100 million product stock-keeping units across 75000 plus retailers and brands.

The company believes that with increasing competition in the industry and consumers becoming more informed the retail business has undergone transformation. Now brands no longer command what’s in and what’s out, consumers are in control. Since there is a lack of accurate information most of the retailers make important decisions with guesswork.

To succeed, brands that can detect prompt trend signals can act fast and meet consumer demands ahead of the competition. Omnilytics has been created keeping this in mind. According to the company, they are constantly seeking to break barriers with technology that will help in the transformation of retail. And this acquisition will help them further their vision.

The company’s proprietary Product Match solution enables its consumers to compare similar or same stock-keeping units (SKU) which helps them in analyzing competitor pricing thus enabling them to make decisions that are backed by data.

Omnilytics clients include Uniqlo’s parent company Fast Retailing, Global Fashion Group along with The Iconic and Zalora, and Adidas among others.

Malaysia-based Supahands was founded in 2014 by Mark Koh. The company creates accurate and clean datasets to train artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms by integrating its proprietary technology with its crowd-sourced human intelligence.

Supahands offer solutions that include data tagging &categorization, and data verification. The company offers end-to-end data technology that labels video clips, images, speech, and text accurately. Supahands has recently teamed up with Carousell to assess search relevance algorithms with an aim to improve the online marketplace’s recommendation and search functions.

The company believes in increasing the adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The use cases of Supahands include geospatial imaging, facial landmark recognition, autonomous vehicles, search relevance and named-entity recognition, and optical character recognition.

Supahands is backed by Cradle Seed Ventures and Patamar Capital as its lead investors and Axiata Digital Innovation Fund, and 500 Startups among others.