Iterate is the world’s simplest, safest, and quickest way to get innovation done.
Our team of experts provides in-depth analysis and recommendations that solve your innovation challenges. Our innovation platform facilitates the steps along your innovation workflow: trend analysis, emerging tech evaluation, and microservices software for rapid application prototyping. Iterate's innovation platform has more than 10 patents pending.
Our solutions appeal to executives and corporate innovators who seek low-risk, systematic ways to scale in-house near-term digital innovation initiatives and long-term strategic planning. Our team has a global presence in North America (Silicon Valley, Colorado), Europe, and Asia (India).
We Have a Global Presence
We are pros at remote work and have been doing it since 2013. At the same time, we have offices and clusters of people in a number of cities:
When asked in a blind survey,
“What do you value most about working at Iterate?”
Iterators wrote:
OUR JOURNEY
2011
Concept Forming.
Between 2011 and 2013, Iterate’s founders worked as board members for a large Eastern European Accelerator. It became clear that the Cloud and SaaS were dramatically altering the global tech landscape. Entrepreneurs from Ukraine to Moldovia to Belarus and Khazhakstan were inventing unique digital tools on top of AWS. Brains, not capital, were becoming the primary barriers to launching a digital business. Indeed, the world was flat. Anyone, anywhere, could build a digital solution and deploy it globally.
2013
Web only.
Founded in September 2013 as Iterate Studio, we leveraged Open Innovation and tested Web-only startups quickly by inserting JavaScript tags into new Tag Manager services. We tracked test results using new A/B platforms like Optimizely or VWO and published the results so that large organizations could make informed decisions.
2014
Beyond web.
Eneco Netherlands (a large energy company) asked us to find 1,300 startups in 10 categories like Deep Learning, Flex & Grid energy distribution, and smart cities. We built a specialized search engine and found 1,300 startups.
2015
Curate.
Iterate.ai launched with a sophisticated curation capability. Our new platform indexed 120,000 startups plus a way to create Collections and grade startups within the Collections.
PilotPass.
We invented a new way to help large companies battle legal and procurement bureaucracy.
2016
Discovery.
Forty thousand startups were added to our database, bringing our total to 160,000. We rebuilt our Al-based search engine read paragraphs about startups, not just keywords. This helped us uncover more unique opportunities for large organizations.
2017
Microservices and Low-Code.
We built v1 of a microservices platform, known today as low-code. Built for rapid prototyping, it connected with legacy software stacks and sped up software development by 10X. We called it Interplay.
Hardware invention.
Our Silicon Valley office started building cutting-edge hardware products that used haptics, voice, and other cutting-edge technologies.
Discovery.
Our database of startups grew to 291,000 companies. Our ability to discover nascent yet game-changing solutions improved.
Signals.
Ulta asks us to build robust methods for tracking trends.
2018
ITERATE CODE.
Iterate.ai and Ulta Beauty co-founded a lab for digital innovation. ITERATE CoDE propelled Ulta’s digital growth and simultaneously, the adoption of Iterate’s advisory solutions, AI-based software (SaaS) platform. As part of this new operating system (OS) which is deployed to customers as platform as a service (PaaS), Iterate and Ulta are able to constantly track and evaluate established and emerging technology trends (Signals), match startups for strategic partnerships and investments, and facilitate testing, development and rapid prototyping of new digital applications and technologies (Interplay).
2019
Growth.
Revenues grew 76% over 2018. Again, without marketing or salespeople.
Middleware.
Both of Iterate's clouds are being infused with lots of "real" AI.
Signals.
Ulta asks us to build robust methods for tracking trends.
2020
Growth.
We grew 42% -- with no marketing or sales efforts. The pandemic hit everyone, but we were lucky and fortunate. Thankfully, our focus is digital + key emerging technologies -- especially AI. In addition, only one of our Members cut back on their investment in Iterate. We are fast and cost-efficient (as we note in our beliefs). Our Members value those traits.
Think Tank + Do Tank.
We began talking about our business as two clouds: our Evaluation Cloud and our Execution Cloud. One of our advisors -- Doug Aley -- has a more fun way to describe us though. He said, "You are a Think Tank and a Do Tank."
Products.
Our Members deployed our intrapreneur program, our proprietary drag-n-drop headless commerce platform, touchless payments for gas stations, AI-based recommendations, a Challenge-orchestration program, scan-n-go, AI-based pricing modules, and much more. Our partner Ulta launched a Digital Innovation page on Ulta.com -- it showcases (here) many projects that we helped them architect and build.
Startups.
Our database grew to more than 1 million startups.
Profitable.
Yes.
R&D.
29% of our revenues.
Middleware.
Enterprises used Interplay as middleware, extensively. It was originally built to enable rapid digital prototyping. Interplay established itself as a versatile digital enablement platform.
Funding.
No. We've not raised money from professional financiers -- like VCs. Our focus is on operations, not on delivering an outsized financial return. We build products based on instincts and Member requests. We stay true to our values. That said, the financial piece works out nicely anyway.
2021
AI.
Iterate brought huge gains in AI core development and deployed AI applications for our clients. Our low-code platform Interplay now has several dozen AI-related nodes. We have built and deployed AI applications for image recognition, document recognition, NLP-related merchandising, and smart chatbots.
Growth.
The company continued stellar growth in 2021.
