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EXIT
Floki
Procurement AI
Sector
Business Model
Headquarters
Portfolio
Founders
Retail
SaaS
São Paulo – Brazil
Iporanga Early Stage II
Marcelo Espiga, Luigi Rodrigues
About
FLOKI is a technology tsunami in a market that operates incredibly rudimentary even today. With intensive use of automation and AI, the company is creating a solution that delivers a leap in how fragmented sectors do their daily shopping. Their mission is to improve retailer’s operation and financial health in fragmented sectors through an end-to-end solution easy to adopt, made possible by the demand aggregation and the practices of the most advanced data technologies available.
FLOKI was born when Luigi and Marcelo saw the merger of 4 factors: 1) daily and top-of-mind pain-point in the customer’s life, 2) a giant market that “is not possible that still operates that way”, 3) problem resolvable with our expertise: intensive use of technology and data and 4) possibility of creating a scalable solution with an innovative product and business model, highly difficult to copy.
Their philosophy and trajectory with FLOKI has always been to substantially solve the problem first, even if manually, before building the product and we think that this approach alone is their differential as a team and is fundamental to build traction quickly to be efficient with use of resources.
FLOKI’s name comes from the Viking figure of the entrepreneurial warrior, who is also exactly our client: the small retailer who kills 1 lion a day to achieve a margin greater than zero.
Founders Trajectory
Marcelo is a control and automation engineer from UFSC . He joined McKinsey after graduation and from the beginning joined Digital practice. In 2014, he received his scholarship to attend the MBA for 2 years at MIT Sloan, but before that he spent 1 year in Guia Bolso, between Series A to Series B, where he rectified his interest in technology startups, especially in growth and in the creation and management of digital products. During the MBA, he went even deeper into entrepreneurship and technology, interning at companies like VMWare, in Palo Alto. In his last stint at McKinsey, he led digital transformation projects for 2.5 years in several financial institutions. Marcelo loves football and the beach – every weekend he manages to make a trip to the sea.
Luigi has a degree in electrical engineering from POLI-USP and worked for 5 years at McKinsey as a consultant on several projects in the retail industry, procurement and also involving Machine Learning via QuantumBlack – McKinsey’s Analytics division. During his MBA at Berkeley he delved even further into A.I. techniques and innovation methodologies, having been Steve Blank’s classroom monitor in the university’s main entrepreneurship class, Lean LaunchPad. Luigi’s great hobby is playing music: drums, guitar, ukulele … maybe one day piano.
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