Captain
Agentic AI platform for joint category development in FMCG. Captain harmonises every retail data source into one verified dataset, then lets category and trade teams question it, simulate promotions and optimise assortment alongside their retail partners.
What is Captain?
Captain is a Dutch retail analytics platform that positions itself as Europe's first Joint Category Development environment: one shared dataset on which an FMCG supplier and its retail partner can grow a category together rather than negotiating from separate, conflicting numbers. It is the rebrand of PEAX Data, whose predecessor site now redirects visitors to Captain.
The premise stated on the site is that category and trade teams lose up to 80% of their time collecting and cleaning data, and that most suppliers barely exploit the retailer data available to them. Captain attacks that in four layers. A harmonised data foundation ingests named sources including Circana, Nielsen, IPV, Roamler, SIS, 7EVEN and the supplier's own ex-factory data, standardising hierarchies, removing duplicates and matching identical products whose descriptions differ. On top sits an agentic AI assistant that answers questions in natural conversation, enriched with business context such as boycotts, stockouts and your fiscal year; the vendor is explicit that this is not a generic copilot and not another dashboarding tool. A promotion simulator, developed with brands including Johma, LFE and Nature's Pride, predicts the effect of discount depth, timing and product combinations on volume, revenue and margin, with a claimed accuracy above 80%. An assortment engine analyses every retailer, store cluster and SKU to show which products earn their shelf space, forecasting the impact of a listing or delisting before it is committed.
Reported outcomes include a cheese category case delivering 5.2% more revenue and 5.1% less waste on the same shelf at a Dutch retailer, and a trade marketing team recovering 25% of its time, equivalent to one full-time role. Delhaize, REWE, elho, Looye, Nature's Pride, Johma and Red Bull appear as customer references.
The platform is browser-based, with no mobile app and no public API. Onboarding runs through a founder call, a pilot of four to six weeks covering up to three data sources, then a wider rollout of roughly five weeks. Pricing starts at €1,500 per month.
What it does
- Harmonise every retail data source into one verified dataset, resolving naming conflicts, duplicates and clashing hierarchies
- Answer category questions in plain language through an AI agent grounded on your own data
- Simulate the effect of a promotion on volume, revenue and margin before it goes live
- Model price elasticity by product, retailer and channel with a dedicated machine learning model
- Optimise assortment per store cluster and predict the impact of a listing, delisting or range change
- Forecast demand by combining sales history, weather and seasonality to reduce stockouts and waste
- Produce customisable reports that suppliers and retailers can work from together
When to use Captain / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Captain is the right fit.
When to use Captain
- FMCG and CPG category managers who spend most of their week cleaning and reconciling retail data instead of shaping category strategy
- Trade marketing teams planning promotional calendars who need to model volume, revenue and margin impact before committing budget
- Key account managers preparing retailer negotiations who want to argue from the retailer's own point-of-sale evidence
- Consumer insights and market research analysts juggling several syndicated panels such as Nielsen, Circana, IPV and Roamler
- Demand planners and S&OP managers who need promotional lift and assortment changes reflected in their forecasts
When not to use Captain
- Small brands with no access to syndicated or retailer point-of-sale data, since the platform's whole value is harmonising sources you already license
- Companies outside fast-moving consumer goods and grocery retail: every module, case study and reference on the site is built around that single vertical
- Buyers who want to sign up and explore on their own, as there is no self-service trial and every route starts with a sales call
- Teams with a software budget below €1,500 per month, the published entry price for the single available plan
- Organisations that require published contractual terms before onboarding, because no terms of service exist and the privacy page is an unfilled template
How to use Captain
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Book a 30-minute discovery call from the contact page, either through the form or directly with one of the two founders
- Use that call to map your current situation, your category growth challenges and where AI could replace reactive reporting
- Take the product demonstration, run against your own use case rather than a generic dataset
- Review the calculator and business case the team sends afterwards, which frames a proposal you can start small with
- Kick off a pilot of four to six weeks, onboarding a maximum of three data sources such as IPV, Nielsen and ex-factory data
- Agree goals and next steps at the pilot kickoff meeting
- Move to full rollout after a successful pilot: additional data sources, dashboard configuration and the promotion simulator, roughly five more weeks
- Run the guided adoption programme for the whole team, led by a senior category manager and included in every plan
- Work day to day in the browser at the platform login: question the agent in plain language, simulate promotions, arbitrate assortment and export reports
- Cancel monthly if the value does not materialise, as the subscription is described as month-to-month
Pros & Cons
Pros
- A published entry price of €1,500 per month, unusual in a segment that almost always hides behind a quote
- An unambiguous and repeated position on AI training: customer data is never used to train models, internally or by third parties, under a zero data retention configuration
- ISO 27001 certification claimed for Captain itself, through an accredited external audit, not merely inherited from its cloud provider
- Hosting confined to Microsoft Azure servers inside the European Union, with no transfer outside the EU unless the client contractually chooses it
- Per-client isolation presented as an architectural property rather than a policy, with data of one client inaccessible to any other
- Data sources named openly, so a buyer can check compatibility before engaging
- Outcomes quantified and tied to identifiable customer cases rather than left as generic claims
Cons
- No terms of service exist at all: the footer link goes nowhere, the usual paths return 404 and nothing appears in the sitemap
- The privacy policy page exists but contains only Lorem ipsum placeholder text, so there is no published privacy policy
- The substantive commitments on data ownership, retention and training live in a Dutch-language blog post rather than any contractual document
- No data protection officer, no privacy contact address and no data subject rights procedure are published
- No subprocessor list is published; only Microsoft Azure is named anywhere
- No API and no technical documentation, so the platform cannot be automated against or fed into another system programmatically
- No free plan and no free trial: every route in starts with a sales call, and only a single pricing tier is published
Pricing & Plans
Captain publishes a single public price point. The plan, named Joint category development, starts at €1,500 per month, with an annual alternative displayed as €18,000 per year. There is no permanent free plan and no free trial; the vendor describes the subscription as cancellable each month. The stated price is an entry point only, since the vendor indicates that cost scales with the number of modules and data sources connected. Four add-on modules are advertised alongside it — the Agentic AI Assistant, the Promo Simulator, Assortment Optimization and the Adoption process — none of them carrying a published price.
- Joint category development — from €1
- 500 per month
- or €18
- 000 per year on the annual option. Includes AI-powered category insights
- an AI agent running the analysis
- customisable reports
- a guided adoption programme led by a senior category manager
- zero data retention with no training on customer data
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Captain handles your data.
GDPR overview
Captain is a Netherlands-based vendor, so no Article 27 representative applies. It states that the platform runs entirely on Microsoft Azure on servers inside the European Union, placing data under European law including the GDPR, with no transfer outside the EU unless a client explicitly chooses it contractually. Encryption covers data at rest and in transit, access is role-based, temporary and fully audit-logged, and a formal agreement covering confidentiality and data processing is signed before any data sharing begins. Captain states it is ISO 27001 certified through an accredited external audit. The caveat is substantial: the site's own privacy policy page contains only Lorem ipsum placeholder text, no data protection officer or privacy contact is named, and no data subject rights procedure is published. The commitments above live in a Dutch-language blog article, not in any contractual document.
Who owns the data?
Captain describes itself as a processing layer rather than a data owner: data flowing through the platform stays the property of the party that supplied it, whether that is the supplier, the retailer or the panel provider. It is processed solely on behalf of the licensed client, only for the analytical purposes agreed, never shared with other clients and never used outside the agreed scope. Cross-client access is presented as architecturally impossible, with a fully separated environment per client. For sources carrying strict compliance conditions, data stays in the client's own cloud and Captain never stores it. All of this is stated on a company blog post and in the site FAQ; no terms of service exist and the published privacy policy is placeholder text.
Reuse rights
Because Captain publishes no terms of service, there is no licence clause setting out what a customer may or may not do with the outputs. What the vendor does state is that insights are generated exclusively for the client holding the licence, that the AI is an interface onto your data rather than an extraction mechanism, and that a client may export their data at any point before the engagement ends. On termination, everything Captain processed for that client is deleted from its systems, described as a contractual commitment tested during ISO 27001 audit. Reuse rights beyond that, and any restriction on redistributing analyses to retail partners, are simply not documented publicly.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Captain states that the platform runs entirely on Microsoft Azure, on servers located inside the European Union, which places the data under European law including the GDPR. No transfer to servers outside the EU takes place unless a client explicitly chooses it and this is set out contractually. No individual country and no specific Azure region is named anywhere, so the EU is the finest granularity available. All data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Where a data provider imposes strict compliance conditions, the data is stored in the client's own cloud environment and Captain processes it in transit without ever storing it on its own infrastructure; the client decides the location and region. For standard sources, such as retailer point-of-sale data drawn from SIS or 7EVEN and the supplier's own ex-factory data, the information may sit on Captain's own secured servers. Microsoft is presented as a strategic infrastructure partner. None of these arrangements appear in a contractual document: they are described in a company blog article and the site FAQ.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Captain.
- The footer email is broken in a way that matters: every page displays info@gocaptain.ai but the link behind it points to info@captain.ai, a domain belonging to an unrelated company. Type the displayed address rather than clicking it
- Three unrelated products share this name. Captain at gocaptain.ai is the category management platform; captain.ai sells restaurant delivery software and captainai.com is an autonomous shipping company also based in Rotterdam. Check the domain before sending anything
- With no terms of service and a placeholder privacy policy, a buyer sharing retailer point-of-sale data has no published contract to rely on. Ask for the data processing agreement and the security documentation in writing before any pilot
- Read the security claims carefully. The FAQ sentence stating ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and GDPR compliance describes the Microsoft Azure environments; it is a separate blog article that states Captain itself holds ISO 27001. Do not assume the certifications of a cloud provider belong to the vendor
- The About page says the company was founded in 2021, yet the domain was only registered in February 2025 and first archived in March 2025. The exact incorporation date could not be confirmed from any published source, and the platform trades under a name it has held for a short time
- The customer logos are references, not endorsements of every claim. Figures such as 5.2% category growth or 7-10x return come from individual cases and depend heavily on the data you already license
- An agent that answers instantly can quietly displace the judgement it is meant to support. The vendor's own framing of human with machine only holds if teams keep interrogating the assumptions behind an answer rather than forwarding the number to a retailer
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low technical difficulty for the end user, but a long commercial runway. There is no self-service signup: entry is a 30-minute discovery call, then a demonstration and a written business case. A pilot of four to six weeks onboards up to three data sources; full rollout then adds further sources, dashboards and the promotion simulator over roughly five more weeks, so expect nine to eleven weeks in total. The real prerequisite is on your side: you must already license retail data sources. Access is through the browser, with nothing to install and no API to build against.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Captain
Fundraising
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is Captain and who is it for?
How much does Captain cost?
Is my data used to train AI models?
Where is the data hosted?
Can another customer or a competitor see my data?
What happens to my data if I stop using Captain?
How long does implementation take?
Does Captain offer an API?
Which data sources can Captain connect to?
Does Captain publish terms of service and a privacy policy?
Should you pick Captain?
Captain is one of the more sharply defined tools in retail analytics. It does not try to be a general assistant: it targets the FMCG category manager who spends most of the week reconciling panel data, and it addresses that with a harmonisation layer, a grounded AI agent, a promotion simulator and an assortment engine. The framing around joint category development, where supplier and retailer work from the same dataset rather than competing numbers, is a genuine differentiator and the customer cases attached to it are specific enough to be checked.
The security posture is also unusually well argued for a company this small. ISO 27001 certification claimed for the vendor itself rather than inherited from its cloud provider, EU-only Azure hosting, per-client isolation described as architectural, no training on customer data and a zero retention configuration are all stated clearly and in detail.
The gap between that and the paperwork is the thing to weigh. Captain publishes no terms of service at all, and its privacy policy page contains nothing but placeholder text. Every commitment above rests on a Dutch-language blog article and a marketing FAQ, neither of which is a contract. There is no named privacy contact, no subprocessor list and no documented rights procedure. For a platform whose entire premise is that competitors' commercially sensitive data can safely sit in the same environment, that is a conspicuous omission rather than a detail.
The published €1,500 monthly entry price deserves credit for transparency, though the real figure scales with modules and connected sources. Buyers with the data to feed it will find a credible product; they should simply insist on seeing the contractual documents that the website does not provide.
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