On May 10, 2022 Silo Technologies announced the strategic acquihire of the e-commerce machine learning platform, Bandit ML. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Bandit ML is a VC backed startup that optimizes product recommendations and promotions for dozens of online stores. Grocery stores, plant shops, skincare boutiques, and many other businesses use Bandit ML services to make sense of their data and improve sales and profit.
Through the acquihire of Bandit ML, Silo enfolds three seasoned engineers with blue-chip software experience and start-up grit into their mission driven team. Edoardo Conti, an ex-senior machine learning engineer at Facebook, Joseph Gilley and ex senior engineer at Uber, and Lionel Vital, a former tech lead at Twitter have officially completed onboarding and are working across critical areas of the Silo Platform in an effort to build a more transparent and sustainable food supply chain for the fresh produce industry.
Haystack, an institutional venture capitalist that has backed household brands such as DoorDash and Instacart identified an opportunity to unite the data and machine learning skill set of the Bandit ML team with the mission driven and customer centric platform that Silo is building to help produce professionals thrive.
“The Bandit ML team is incredibly passionate about helping customers use their data to improve their sales and overall business,” says Edoardo Conti, Founder of Bandit ML. “We were looking to join forces with a company that was working on something meaningful. The supply chain that Silo focuses on is how we get food on our table and making that a more efficient and sustainable process is something really exciting to work on. We’re ready to build tools to help growers, shippers, and distributors understand their businesses better, whether it’s making changes to who they are selling to, where they are buying from, what produce trends to take note of, or how to execute on opportunities for growth–unlocking this data and presenting it in a way that helps Silo’s customers better understand their world gets me really excited.”
Surfacing data that provides produce professionals with the insights necessary to make more informed business decisions has been a focus of Silo’s from the beginning. “Our product and engineering team is doubling down making data more consumable,” says Ashton Braun, CEO at Silo. “Our customers’ data is powerful and it belongs to them. Our teams’ job is to understand what’s important to our customers, what would help them make better business decisions, and what information or cash flow is necessary to accelerate their growth, ideally giving them a leg up and more confidence as they navigate the market. The Bandit ML team is a very strong engineering team that has had the opportunity to work on some pretty hardcore machine learning challenges. They share our passion for solving complex problems, and have seen the type of scale that we are anticipating, as we focus on building an end-to-end platform for the food supply chain.”
As Silo continues to connect the physical side of the produce industry with the financial services necessary to give ultimate control over their cash flow, the Silo Team looks to tackle more logistical problems that empower their customers to streamline their business processes.
“A lot of the success of this will come down to building tools our customers can leverage to get ahead of the market,” says Braun, “machine learning and predictive data analytics are a big part of that. Through the Silo Platform, these three people are going to add something special to this industry that hasn’t been seen before. It’s truly exciting to welcome Edoardo, Joseph, and Lionel to the produce industry. Every day we get to work on problems that matter. This is where I want to be, and I know that they feel the same way.”
