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Bobby Marhamat, CEO of Raydiant has been selected by the Judges of World Biz Magazine's Annual Awards to be a recipient of the Top 100 CEOs in Innovation Award 2022. This selection follows a stringent process that evaluated over 40,000 nominees to select the exclusive list of 100 winners.
Bobby Marhamat started business building before 4th grade, and he hasn’t stopped. Growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, Bobby remembers watching his father launch and grow profitable businesses and taking in each success and failure. At 9 years old, he became an entrepreneur himself and he still applies the lessons he learnt from his father to this day.
Today, this contributing member of Forbes Business Development Council and current CEO of Raydiant and former executive of technology companies like Verizon, Revel, and Highfive, helps multiple businesses identify and implement the measures they need to help them boost customer loyalty, expand and survive.
As the CEO of Raydiant, Bobby has helped scale the company to become the leader in in-location experience management. Today, Raydiant stands as the leading innovative, fastest growing and most funded company in experience platform management.
Raydiant is the first experience platform for physical spaces and is the new way customers and employees connect with brands.
"We now have the most complete platform that combines customer and employee experience technologies with an AI-based analytics platform that allows you to track, learn and personalize the customer journey in real time. No other company can do what we do and we will work hard to always lead the market with innovation."
You have a unique entrepreneurial background that started in 4th grade. Share with us your beginnings and journey to this point?
BM - I started buying items from the Oriental Trading Company in the 4th grade and setting up “sale days” in my parents garage – particularly selling items to my sister’s friends. I got a taste for entrepreneurship and continued down that track - it’s what I was born to do.
Why is Raydiant best placed to help brick-and-mortar operations thrive in the digital age?
BM - Raydiant started from a tiny startup focused on digital signage into re-inventing the way that brick-and-mortar operators create experiences within their locations that allow brands to increase revenues, increment customer loyalty and create a consistent brand experience. We now have the most complete platform that combines customer and employee experience technologies with an AI-based analytics platform that allows you to track, learn and personalize the customer journey in real time. No other company can do what we do and we will work hard to always lead the market with innovation.
"Sightcorp by Raydiant's proprietary technology allows media owners to provide advertisers and media buyers with meaningful audience insights and data visualizations based on live analysis captured anonymously on-camera, including age, gender, opportunity to see (OTS), impression and viewer counts, and attention and dwell times. To ensure privacy, the Sightcorp DeepSight Toolkit blurs all faces by default and is built to process all data offline and locally."
Talk to us about some of the solutions Raydiant offers and the advantages your customers derive from them.
BM - We are at the intersection of two massive markets — the customer experience market and the employee experience market. Within these markets, our platform overlaps with two core existing industries:
Category 1: Signage and Interactive
Four Winds Interactive
Scala
Spectrio
Category 2: Employee Communication + Rewards + Gamification
Nudge
Yoobic
Zipline
While our platform's features and capabilities do overlap with these market categories, we don’t easily fit into any single category. This has left us no choice but to develop our own category. We call this new category In-Location Experience Management, which we define as the discipline of creating, managing, and scaling the experiences brands deliver to customers and employees at their physical locations.
Raydiant recently acquired Sightcorp, a spinoff from the University of Amsterdam that provides state-of-the-art, proprietary AI-powered audience intelligence for digital signage, digital out-of-home (DOOH) media, and in-store analytics. Raydiant and Sightcorp now jointly enable brands to create personalized on-screen, in-location experiences that generate anonymous audience and performance analytics to help them increase audience engagement, deliver valuable content, enhance messaging, and more.
Sightcorp by Raydiant's proprietary technology allows media owners to provide advertisers and media buyers with meaningful audience insights and data visualizations based on live analysis captured anonymously on-camera, including age, gender, opportunity to see (OTS), impression and viewer counts, and attention and dwell times. To ensure privacy, the Sightcorp DeepSight Toolkit blurs all faces by default and is built to process all data offline and locally. Sightcorp by Raydiant cites the highest accuracy rate compared to its competitors and is the only player in the market applying 100% of the latest deep learning research in its audience analytics products.
Share with us some details about Raydiant’s growth over the last couple of years and your expectations for the coming years.
BM - Raydiant has grown 350% year-over-year since 2019 and is on a clear trajectory to continue to grow at that same clip into 2022, 2023 and beyond.
How do you motivate yourself to ensure consistent high performance?
BM - I get motivated by our talented team of ‘Rays’. Seeing how we come together as a team motivates me to continue to build the infrastructure and bring in the appropriate capital to ensure that we can work towards our bigger goal of continuing to help brick-and-mortar operators thrive in their operations.
"My approach to leadership is to set the vision for the company and then hire folks that are smarter than me to build their departments with an eye on the greater vision of where we want to take the company."
How would you describe your approach to leadership?
BM - My approach to leadership is to set the vision for the company and then hire folks that are smarter than me to build their departments with an eye on the greater vision of where we want to take the company. I am here to support, empower and provide the needed tools for them to achieve our combined goals.
What about Raydiant are you most proud of?
BM - The team. The team is what has gotten us this far. The team is what will continue to ensure we are the innovative market leaders in our space.
What’s next for Raydiant?
BM - Growth, growth and lots of growth. In addition to that we have our eyes set on a few more acquisitions that will complete our view of what the most comprehensive marketing and commerce platform needs to look like. As we started to grow our platform, we realized that multi-location brick-and-mortar operators needed a comprehensive solution that incorporated both customer and employee experience technologies. That was the beginning of what we call the Experience Platform™ -- a new category that we created to bring together all of these fragmented technologies and have them automate the in-store experience.
For more information, please visit raydiant.com
This article appeared in World Biz Magazine's Q2, 2022 Issue
