🇮🇸 Context (Suite) Is Key To Success

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By Elías Thorsson

Stefán Baxter is the founder and CEO of Smart Data and QuickLookup and at Startup Iceland, he announced the launch of his latest product Context Suite. There are a multitude of external factors that impact businesses on a daily basis and Context Suite seeks to gather as much data as possible about those to help businesses make informed decisions and to plan accordingly.

“Context Suite is a software solution for companies that enables them to easily link internal business data to their external environment and all the external factors that impact a company’s performance,” says Baxter.

Different factors impact different companies, not just across industries, but also across
geography and Baxter says his software takes these parameters into consideration when
providing its customers with key insights.

“For example, if you are operating a retail business in a small Icelandic town like Ísafjörður, the external factors that’ll impact your business are weather, big sporting events and the arrival of large cruise ships, etc. In Reykjavík these events might matter less, but there you’ll have factors like the currency rate, price of gas and large tv events like Eurovision that change consumer behavior,” he says.

According to Baxter, factors as varied as labor strikes and holidays don’t just affect sales
volumes, but also the types of goods and services being purchased by consumers. He hopes that by providing companies with comprehensive and easy-to-use data he can help them optimize and become more efficient.

“We want to be the one-stop shop where companies come to understand all the external factors impacting their businesses,” says Baxter. “Linking your internal and external data is a very difficult task and because this task is so difficult, not many companies have the bandwidth to do it.”

Accurate data is invaluable to all companies and having an accurate way to estimate things like necessary inventory and the number of employees needed for a specific day can help companies increase profitability; Baxter says the feedback from business has been positive.

“We have been improving prediction models and providing insights that companies didn’t have,” he says. ”We’ve been getting comments like ‘I’ve been waiting for something like this for a decade’. We are opening a window, where before there was just a mirror.”

Despite the positive feedback, Baxter admits that the situation in the global economy has made it tricky to find funding.

“I want to thank the Icelandic Research Fund (Rannís), we wouldn’t be here without them and we also have a super team of angel investors,” says Baxter. “Money is expensive these days, this is not the best time to go look for it. So we decided to create enough revenue to become customer funded. We hope that investors’ optimism will have reached a sensible level in the fall and then we can go back to funding mode.”

FURTHER STARTUP ICELAND 2023 COVERAGE

Elías Thorsson is a journalist, writer, and marketing specialist with extensive experience covering business and technology affairs in Iceland. He has been covering Startup Iceland 2023.