SAP Startup Spotlight Series: Velou

Sadee Gamhewa is the founder and CEO of Velou, an AI-powered retail start-up. He has 22 years of industry experience in product and engineering with expertise in data science, AI/ML and e-commerce. Sadee Gamhewa previously led product, innovation, machine learning, AI strategy and engineering at several start-ups and Fortune 100 companies including Sysco, Accenture and Fujitsu. He holds patents in e-commerce and has published research papers on machine learning and AI. He received his BSc in Computer Science with honors from Edith Cowan University, Australia.

1. What is Velou and what do you offer?

Velou is an AI copilot tailored for brands and retailers that automates ecommerce functions, all backed by industry-specific data. Ecommerce teams lose precious time, incur significant expenses, and miss opportunities due to the inefficiency of manual reviews of product catalogs, and blindspots created by lack of access to retail data and analytics. Velou’s AI is fine-tuned for ecommerce to offer industry-specific solutions. It reviews a retailer’s entire product catalog, identifies missing metadata, auto-generates product descriptions, and enriches and standardizes ecommerce data. Velou increases productivity for ecommerce teams and revenue through powerful analytics so retailers know how they’re converting and losing customers.

Our services are available globally with offices in San Francisco, Munich and Paris at Station F through the LVMH accelerator.

2. How does your solution work?

Velou uses three AI technologies to automate and optimize the e-commerce business of online retailers. Velou's computer vision models automatically analyze product images to identify product attributes such as color, style, fabric and shape that resonate with shoppers. By combining this technology with our own industry-specific datasets, which serve as the basis for the models, Velou's product data can enrich online retailers' product pages by automatically creating product descriptions and providing discovery features. Finally, Velou's Natural Language Processing uses all this information to understand search phrases that convert more customers, easing the burden on e-commerce teams.

3. Do customers need special technology/devices to access your service?

Velou is already tightly integrated with the largest ecommerce platforms. Velou does all the work while retailers have full control, so no special technology or expertise is required.

4. Why did you found Velou?

AI in online retail is exciting because it can be applied today. We want ecommerce teams to have control over how it’s working while boosting their efficiency. Velou believes online retail is an ideal application for AI because it addresses two crucial challenges for online retailers - manual management of product catalogs and the need to analyze and optimize conversions and retention.

5. How are you connected to SAP? Can your solution be integrated in SAP systems and if so, how?

Velou is a SAP.iO Rising Stars startup and our solution is available through the SAP Store. You can visit us at the SAP Experience Center in Paris and play around with our demo store!

We work closely with SAP engineering to make the SAP Commerce Cloud + Velou integration seamless. Velou is a one-click deployment. This makes using Velou on the SAP platform super easy!

6. How has SAP.iO’s involvement impacted your journey?

SAP.iO has been and continues to be an amazing conduit to knowledge, networks, and spaces! The environments that the SAP.iO program creates for startups to connect, from conferences to the teams and events are absolutely helpful for business development. We’ve learnt alot from experts about the SAP ecosystem. And by working closely with SAP, it opened many doors to large enterprise customers for us that otherwise would have been challenging to access for a startup. 

7. What's the next step for Velou?

Velou continually refines its AI technology to push automation and optimization to new levels for online retailers. And once deployed, Velou’s AI continues to learn about retailers’ customer behavior which enables it to deliver better results over time.

You can share your questions, comments and concerns in the comments section below. If you'd like to read more from this series, check out our previous article under the link.

velou.com