Aampe innovates to help brands create relevant messages for unique consumers

The startup’s e-commerce client recorded a 6.7% incremental additional purchase events from consumers after generating relevant marketing messages.

E-commerce apps are faced with the challenge of encouraging additional purchases from inactive customers who have become frustrated over generic and repetitive promotions. This is where Paul Meinshausen, CEO and co-founder of Singapore-based startup platform, Aampe, comes in.

One of the startup’s e-commerce clients recorded a significant increase in user engagement and conversions by using Aampe’s AI to identify a user’s preferences. Using this method, Aampe was able to drive over 65% of all new user purchases from just 32% of the total new user population. 

Speaking to the Singapore Business Review, Meinshausen said Aampe is in the business of solving this challenge with his artificial intelligence (AI) platform, helping businesses enhance the reach of their products and services using AI that will make messaging more relevant and specific for customers.
 
He said their software-as-a-service platform uses AI called “reinforcement learning” that observes users’ specific preferences and behaviour in the app and acts on them to drive additional engagement and conversions.
 
Aampe’s AI replaces conventional consumer relationship management tools that manually create messaging to engage with their customers. Aampe uses probabilistic and dynamic AI to anonymously generate and send messages to each user and optimises the user’s likelihood to engage.
 
“It can help you find what you want and what you need much faster, and be very relevant for you as a person and kind of motivate and help you enjoy the app experience. When you do that, people stick around in your app more and they make more orders,” Meinshausen told Singapore Business Review.
 
For example, one of Aampe’s clients, ZALORA, wanted to better engage their inactive users. ZALORA used the startup’s GPT-3 integration to generate over a hundred thousand unique and instrumented messages from lipstick to sportswear, aimed at different buyer preferences from popularity and affordability to convenience and quality.
 
After integrating Aampe into its marketing strategy, ZALORA recorded 13.2% incremental additional app visits, 12.8% incremental additional add-to-cart events, and 6.7% incremental additional purchase events.
 
The early-stage tech firm so far raised $SG10.2Mm (US$7.5m) pre-series A funding round led by their top investors Matrix Partners India and Peak XV Partners.

Inspired by a physicist’s measurements

Before launching Aampe in 2020, Meinshausen thought of introducing his company with a distinctive name.
 
He sourced the name from French physicist, Andre-Marie-Ampere, who founded the science of electrodynamics. Ampere also coined the measurement for the electric current unit, ampere, which is abbreviated to amp.
 
“[Andre-Marie-Ampere] did a particular kind of physics that introduced experimentation into physics that we thought was interesting and represented how critical experimentation is for any kind of progress,” said Meinshausen.

Thinking differently

Other traditional marketing software tends to be deterministic — working in a straightforward cause-and-effect manner — rather than probabilistic, which is what Aampe offers to businesses.

“Most software is deterministic in the sense that if something happens in the software…one thing leads to another thing. In AI, it’s probabilistic,” Meinshausen said, referring to the exploration of probabilities.
 
“If you do this, there’s a chance of this happening. If you do this, there’s a chance of this happening. It's probabilistic,” he further explained.
 
Aampe replaces deterministic AI with probabilistic AI, which “specifically counterfactual contextual bandit algorithms and reinforcement learning to autonomously generate and send messages to each user to maximize the user’s likelihood to engage and convert.”
 
The Aampe CEO also said they think differently in solving the problem, having a team of machine learning and AI engineers, instead of other software built by marketers and software engineers.

Early-stage startup

Asked if they were coming out with more unique services, Meinshausen said they would focus first on how to grow their core infrastructure, which is using AI software to generate more relevant messaging for businesses.
 
Right now, Aampe is concentrating on creating a space where marketers and data scientists can collaborate and continue to make data science capabilities more evident so that more companies can use the platform.
 
“We have a very clear path ahead of us before we roll out completely new products or features,” he said.