Reach Markets sat down with meldCX Co-Founder and CEO to ask a number of questions about the company’s recent progress.

What key contract wins has the company achieved recently, and what is currently in the pipeline?

A key contract win in Australia was POP Media, which puts meldCX’s technology into IGA. The retail group has over 1,400 locations in Australia. The initial rollout will be to a small sample of 

them, but the contract for that alone already totals over $3 million. The independent grocery brand is owned by Metcash – who recorded $17.4 billion revenue in 2022.

The company will also be going live in three Sherwin-Williams (SHW) locations at the end of March after winning a bidding process. With 3,872 SHW locations in the USA and 5 meldCX cameras/sensors per location, they believe that the possibilities of this new partnership are extraordinary. As a joint initiative between Cisco and meldCX, SHW will be using the new ‘Journey’ product in meldCX’s arsenal of artificial intelligence capabilities. 

They also won another bid to work on a project with Intel and NASA, where the joint initiative has built an educational platform called ‘AI Playground’. It’s ready for launch, and it’s anticipated will be rolled out across Australia, UK and USA throughout the next 2 years.

How has the company coped in terms of delivery of these services on the timelines set by the clients?

One of the major changes that came out of the covid pivot was the building of AI models that clients can self configure in the way that they want. Instead of waiting for hardware, the meldCX team developed 14 AI models that have been grouped together and resulted in 90% of the work they do not being custom at all – drastically reducing the time it takes to roll out their services. Of course, some of these capabilities are heavily patented.

An example of this would be the combination of a module that looks at hand movements and gestures, and another module that looks at behaviour. In a retail environment, it provides the ability to gauge the type of consumer that engages with certain products. A client is able to easily view the results and adjust the target areas through meldCX’s platform, without needing any technical resources.

Stephen described this perfectly, stating “We’ve completely commercialised, and made it very easy for customers to take what we have out of the box and run”.

Even when there is a more complex requirement, as was the case with Perdue Farms and their chicken processing lines needing to analyse 180 different data points on a single product – meldCX is able to get this up and running in remarkably short time. The largest American poultry processor, with over US$8 billion revenue in 2021, was able to in some cases lift capacity by up 70 % in the initial testing without the increase in team member opex. meldCX is now rolling out to more of their facilities.

How is the company tracking in terms of meeting its revenue forecasts?

The company will deliver booked revenue this quarter that is equal to the same amount of sales they did during all of last year. Stephen largely attributes this to their increased speed of rollout, which stems from the further development of their software. It’s able to work on new and existing hardware, which means clients don’t have to invest large amounts of capital on new infrastructure to able to run meldCX’s AI models.

What strategic investor and/or acquisition interest have you received recently? 

The company has received significant interest from top tier big tech firms, a few of which are their partners. While Stephen reckons it’s definitely a bit early, especially given the massive increase in their growth, it’s been encouraging to see these discussions move from majority ownership interest to a minority stake for growth equity.

How has the recent increased attention on AI impacted meldCX?

While demand for meldCX’s product suite has been intense since well before the rise of ChatGPT, Stephen has taken particular consideration to be proactive on the ethics side of operations. There has been particular scrutiny around video AI – which is something that meldCX has completely eliminated from uploading to its cloud.

The company made a substantial investment in getting verified by TrustArc, a leading independent certifier of privacy practices and compliance. In fact, the company has gone as far as to design their products to conform with a soon to be released UNESCO ethical AI standard which was recently drafted by the United Nations. Unnecessary use of facial recognition is something that customers are particularly wary of, and meldCX is refined their AI to be able to extract all of the required data points without it.  

In a stance that is firmly in line with and certainly exceeds ESG standards, their AI models are unable to detect a person’s race. It is a firm part of their standards and ethical requirements that none of their models are tested on humans. 

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