Walmart’s Sparkcubate program identifies start-up to improve online search experience

Sparkcubate is Walmart's internal program that identifies start-ups and companies who can inject energy into early-stage innovation. Launched two years ago, Sparkcubate has already graduated more than a dozen projects from a pilot phase, resulting in greater efficiency for Walmart Global Tech teams and better experiences for customers.

Noogata is one example of the companies Walmart piloted through the Sparkcubate program and now utilizes to optimize the online seller and shopping experience. Essentially, Noogata helps Walmart’s online sellers add items in a simpler way using retail artificial intelligence. When a customer is looking for a particular product, it’s crucial to get product descriptions right. Think of sheets, for example: Is the sheet fitted or flat? What color is it? What fabric is it made of? Noogata leverages a sophisticated AI model to understand a product’s key attributes and ensure that they’re entered correctly and structured in a way that’s easy for shoppers to understand.

Noogata's services help Walmart Global Tech's Global Catalog team by reducing the time it takes for sellers to make products discoverable on Walmart's online marketplace; in turn, saving time helps save money. Where typically it could take almost 30 minutes to manually process a Stock Keeping Unit (SKU), Noogata’s AI retail models reduce that time to less than five.

The Sparkcubate team helped identify Noogata’s capabilities when the Global Catalog team was looking to implement retail AI technology to scale and make selection monitoring more efficient. Now, Noogata helps save the Global Catalog team time, helps to create better experience for online sellers, and helps ensure customers get the products they want. Noogata also benefits from the Sparkcubate team’s evaluation, pilot, and finally, expertise on how they may continue to help the business innovate.

Have a startup that’s innovating and helping solve customer needs in retail? Reach out to the Sparkcubate team at Harish.Balasubramanian@walmart.com.