A Liverpool AI company has just secured £2.4m to solve one of retail's most expensive problems: working out when to offer you a discount without leaving money on the table.
Made With Intent's pitch is straightforward. Retailers haemorrhage margin by offering blanket discounts to customers who would have bought anyway, whilst missing the shoppers who need a nudge at precisely the right moment. The startup's AI model claims to predict purchase intent in real-time by analysing hundreds of on-site behavioural signals, from clicks to dwell time, allowing retailers to optimise when and how aggressively to discount.
The funding round, led by the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II through PXN Ventures, positions the company within the government's broader push to build tech clusters outside London. What makes this particularly interesting, though, is the client roster the company has already assembled: Hotel Chocolat, Benson for Beds, and Jacamo. These aren't experimental early adopters throwing £10k at a trial. They're mid-market retailers facing brutal margin pressure from both discount giants and premium brands.
When analytics becomes prediction
David Mannheim, the company's founder and chief executive, frames the problem in terms most ecommerce operators will recognise. According to Mannheim, brands fixate on basic metrics like page views and time on site without understanding the underlying intent these behaviours signal. The result? Missed sales and discounts offered to customers who didn't need the incentive.
The "Moneyball approach" language crops up here, as it does in roughly half of all B2B SaaS pitches these days. The comparison has worn thin, but there's an underlying truth worth extracting. Just as Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane used statistical analysis to identify undervalued players, Made With Intent is betting that most retailers systematically misread customer signals and leak margin as a result.
Patricia El Jichi, investment manager at PXN Ventures, described Made With Intent as "leading the industry" in solving consumer intent prediction. That's investor language, and the claim needs unpacking. The company is operating in an increasingly crowded space where everyone from venture-backed startups to enterprise software giants is applying machine learning to commerce. What distinguishes Made With Intent's approach isn't entirely clear from the public material, though the speed of client acquisition since the company's 2023 founding suggests something is resonating with buyers.
The personalisation question
Here's where the story gets more complex. When a system can predict your likelihood to purchase with increasing accuracy, where does helpful personalisation end and psychological manipulation begin?
Consider the shopper browsing Hotel Chocolat's site, lingering on a £45 gift box but not quite committing. An AI system monitoring hundreds of behavioural signals might detect hesitation and trigger a 15% discount code. Seems helpful. But that same system might equally determine you're highly likely to buy anyway and deliberately withhold the discount it would have offered a more reluctant shopper.
This isn't hypothetical. Dynamic pricing and personalised discounting already exist across travel, hospitality, and some retail categories. What Made With Intent represents is the continued sophistication of these tools, making them accessible to mid-market retailers who previously lacked the data science capacity to build them in-house.
The company appears to have been founded in 2023 yet has already landed contracts with recognised retail brands. That timeline deserves scrutiny. Either Mannheim had existing relationships in the sector, the technology was developed elsewhere before being spun out, or these retailers are desperate enough for margin improvement to bet on an early-stage vendor. Any of those scenarios tells us something useful about the state of ecommerce economics.
Regional tech and retail's margin crisis
The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II backing isn't incidental colour. Regional venture capital has faced persistent questions about deal quality and returns, particularly as "levelling up" rhetoric has cooled in government priorities. A Liverpool-based B2B software company with paying enterprise clients and clear unit economics makes for a decent case study in what regional startup ecosystems can produce when the fundamentals align.
For the retail clients themselves, the calculation is simple arithmetic. According to industry data, retailers typically operate on single-digit net margins in ecommerce, with customer acquisition costs rising and conversion rates under constant pressure. If an AI tool can improve conversion by even a few percentage points whilst reducing discount leakage, the ROI becomes compelling quickly.
The strategic question for these retailers, though, is whether they're buying temporary competitive advantage or simply keeping pace with what will become table stakes. If predictive intent analysis becomes standard across the sector within 18 months, Hotel Chocolat gains nothing except the cost of the software. The real winners would be the technology vendors and, potentially, consumers who benefit from more precisely targeted discounts.
Made With Intent will need to demonstrate that its model continues learning and improving faster than competitors can replicate the approach. The £2.4m gives Mannheim runway to prove that thesis and scale the sales operation. Whether this becomes the standard for how online retail handles discounting, or simply another tool in an increasingly complex martech stack, depends largely on how quickly the technology can prove its impact on actual P&L statements rather than engagement metrics.
