Veracell & Cambri: A Symbiotic Success Story

Traditionally, validating a new product for the market has been an expensive and a heavy process where product testing takes place at the very end of the innovation process. This leads us to the current state where the lion’s share – that is, 80% – of the product launches fail. Here Cambri steps in.

Cambri is an innovative and intelligent market research and concept testing software, that helps consumer brands succeed in product launches. Cambri makes hypothesis-driven concept testing easy, agile, and affordable by productizing the research process. Concept testing is brought to the early stages of the innovation process and the software enables it as often as wanted with just a few clicks – without compromising the research quality. The response for the product will thus be more predictable as its value for the target consumer group can be maximized in the evaluation process by the consumer insight delivered by Cambri: a tool that reaches over 100 million consumers globally. 

Veracell and Cambri began their collaboration in the spring of 2020 after Cambri’s concept was validated with a prototype. When evaluating the initial platform, the Cambri team noticed that the software must be migrated to another technical environment to better scale up the product and add more sophisticated functionalities. Cambri’s CEO, Dr. Heli Holttinen, talks about the beginning of the partnership with Veracell:

"We were excited to get a proof of concept for Cambri, but we soon realized it could become much more than the simple prototype it was. We wanted to include more machine learning and AI in Cambri to bring more expert market research methods to the users. Thus, we began to look for a partner who could provide us with top expertise in data science and software development.

Veracell’s reputation had preceded them, and with their matching profile, Veracell was chosen as our technical partner. Soon after the project began, we were able to add advanced features to Cambri that only full-service market research projects had provided in the past. Veracell’s expertise directly supports our goals to democratize market research and grow as a globally significant actor in the field."

The Cambri and Veracell teams form one inseparable unit

The CEO of Veracell, Timo Erkkilä, has been an essential part of Cambri’s journey for the past year and a half. With his lead, an in-house tech and data science team has been built for Cambri, supplemented with Veracell’s dedicated consultants. The hybrid-team model has proved to be excellent for Cambri’s needs.

"A top-notch technical implementation is one of the most critical enablers to Cambri’s success. So, we chose Timo to run our technical operations and build the dream tech team by recruiting in-house employees and using the easy-to-scale resources from Veracell’s network. The internal and external teams are perfectly blended, forming one unit, Dr. Holttinen says and continues:


I genuinely feel we have the field’s finest software developers and data scientists among us. For example, we have a developer-mathematician from Veracell building an algorithm for price optimization. Their network’s skill set is extensive and flexibly at our disposal."

Migrating the tool to the new platform has not gone without its issues, but together the teams have revisited their working methods and built more efficient ways of reaching their common goals. Dr. Heli Holttinen describes the collaboration:

"Both of us, Veracell and Cambri, have learned a thing or two about prioritizing – and it’s okay. The teams’ open communication allows us to sit down and critically view our modus operandi without compromising the excellent team spirit."

Expert know-how is one thing, but matching on a personal level is another part of the success

Dr. Heli Holttinen says she could not ask for more from the Veracell team, which fits Cambri like a glove. From Veracell, they receive both technical and strategic consultancy, and there is no end in sight for the collaboration. Dr. Heli Holttinen summarizes:

"Whether there is a need to develop natural language processing (NLP) or conjoint analysis algorithms, tweak the frontend, or find the right senior backend developer as an extra resource, Veracell delivers. And in addition to their expertise, they are simply the most wonderful and motivated people one could find.


Veracell and Cambri’s teams interact perfectly: we celebrate the milestones together, dare to challenge, and are humbled to learn more from each other. 
Even if Veracell is an external service provider to us on paper, the commitment and ambition toward Cambri are almost tangible. They are a part of us.

Since the beginning of our partnership, Cambri’s turnover has doubled, and the growth is only expected to accelerate more. On both rational and emotional levels, I'm beyond happy that we have found such a great partner to support Cambri’s success. Without Veracell’s CEO Timo Erkkilä and his team, I don’t believe we would have come as far as we now have."

In the beginning of 2021, Cambri secured a 3.6M€ series A investment from OpenOcean and Spintop Ventures to help scale up its market research SaaS business. Read more about Cambri here: https://cambri.io.