Haystack is the search engine for finding consumer products at nearby stores, taking the pain out of a process that still exists without the transparency of online search.
Haystack uses a Waze-like crowdsourcing approach combined with machine learning and AI to surface inventory at every store, even the smallest local stores without any digital systems. As initial users interact with Haystack, results go from a mixture of probabilistic likelihoods and real-time information to increasingly certain results everywhere.
For retailers, Haystack provides a new customer acquisition channel based on product inventory, provides analytics on hyper-local product demand that help stores optimize their inventory supply, and enables integration into product pick-up and on-demand delivery markets.
Haystack’s beta (web, iOS app) currently covers 40,000 baseline products across every store in the U.S., and is now integrating the real-time data feeds that will power local results for every specific product search.
Haystack was founded by Benjamin Dean (Wharton MBA, Pomona BA), Mayor Bloomberg’s founding Chief Analyst for NYC’s national-award-winning Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, who one day in the rain realized he couldn’t google where to find an umbrella.
