Nike acquires data science firm Celect

Nike, Inc. has announced the acquisition of Celect, a leading retail predictive analytics and demand sensing firm based in Boston, USA. Celect is Nike’s latest acquisition fuelling its Consumer Direct Offense strategy, which aims to serve customers in a personal manner on a global scale.

Nike's Chief Operating Officer Eric Sprink said: “With the acquisition of Celect, Nike greatly accelerates our digital advantage by adding a platform developed by world-class data scientists. As demand for our product grows, we must be insight-driven, data-optimised and hyper-focused on consumer behaviour. This is how we serve consumers more personally at scale.”

Celect, founded in 2013, holds a cutting-edge intellectual property portfolio across data science and software engineering. Celect’s cloud-based analytics platform provides proprietary insights that allow retailers to optimise inventory across an omni-channel environment through hyper-local demand predictions.

Celect's team will immediately be integrated into Nike's Global Operations Team and its co-founders will continue as tenured professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, consulting Nike on an ongoing basis.

“We’re thrilled to be joining the Nike team, adding our unique and innovative capabilities to the data and analytics foundation they’ve been building over the years,” said John Andrews, Celect CEO.