Strategic partnership will bring scientific breakthrough in choice modeling to the U.S. Intelligence Community

‍September 3, 2015

‍Celect, a market leader in predictive analytics and choice modeling for retailers, today announced a strategic partnership with In-Q-Tel, the investment organization that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The Boston-based company, founded by MIT professors Vivek Farias and Devavrat Shah, uses a fundamental technological breakthrough in machine learning, which allows retailers to truly understand their customers' buying patterns. Retailers can now truly understand how a specific customer might choose from a vast assortment of products. Celect brings science to the art of retail.

The Celect Optimization Platform enables merchandisers, retail planners, and inventory analysts to create optimized and localized product assortments across all channels, and in turn, increase inventory turnover and revenue while fostering a better customer experience. The platform takes vast amounts of disparate data, making it actionable and insightful.

"The advanced analytic technology that drives the Celect Choice Engine has many promising applications for our government customers," said Robert Ames, Senior Vice President of IQT's Advanced Analytics Practice. "We look forward to working with Celect as it continues development of this exciting platform."

"The investment by IQT further validates the power of the underlying science and technology of the Celect Choice Engine," said John Andrews, CEO of Celect. "As we continue to see success and growth by helping retailers truly understand how their customers choose from an assortment of products, we are very excited to further enhance our platform to assist with the mission of In-Q-Tel and the Federal Government."

‍About Celect

‍Celect is a big data predictive analytics platform that enables retail buyers, merchandisers, planners and inventory analysts to increase sales, margins, and reduce markdowns by placing the right product, in the right place, at the right time - across all channels. By turning big data into smart data, the Celect Choice Engine allows retailers to understand how an individual customer shopping at a specific location chooses from an assortment of products. The technology builds on a fundamental advance in customer choice modeling and machine learning called by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, one of the 50 greatest innovations it has ever produced. For more information, visit Celect.net.