Pricing intelligence startups like Sciative Solutions, DataWeave Price2Spy, and Intelligence Node, are experiencing their busiest season as festive sales have triggered an unprecedented pricing war across channels. Major e-commerce players are now changing prices 12-15 times daily during Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival, up from 3-4 times a day during the last festive period, according to industry estimates.
The intensification has been driven by consumer adoption of real-time pricing comparison providers like BuyHatke, Honey, CashKaro, PriceDekho, MySmartPrice, and Desidime, forcing constant competitive adjustment. These consumer tools have collectively surpassed 10 million downloads.
Consumer tools drive hyper-competition and real-time visibility
The transparency created by consumer tools has driven explosive adoption of seller-side competitive intelligence platforms that rely on web crawling and API integrations with over 250+ platforms. These offerings range from rule-based systems to sophisticated agentic-AI systems. Rule-based are supervised and rely entirely on a fixed rule set by the human seller (eg, increase price if inventory drops below X units). They are typically restricted to a single channel and lack the ability to autonomously interpret dynamic market shifts. They start at around Rs 2.5 lakh monthly for approximately 1,000 unique SKUs. More sophisticated agentic systems cost Rs 4-4.5 lakh monthly for 1,000 unique SKUs, using unsupervised learning to analyse cross-cannibalisation between products, competitor behaviour, and market demand autonomously, reducing the need for large pricing teams.
The expansion of quick commerce into festive season sales has made real-time pricing optimisation particularly critical. “65% of D2C brands now use some form of automated pricing intelligence, during this festive season we are seeing a 4x jump in the number of pricing optimisations by these brands,” said Vijeta Soni, founder of Sciative Solutions.
From rule-based to agentic-AI
“Real-time visibility is non-negotiable now. We used to adjust prices manually based on daily reports. Now, the data feed is so immediate that we’ve had to cautiously embrace AI-driven pricing. The festive window accounts for nearly 40% of our annual revenue, and a pricing mistake could be catastrophic. The AI is a competitive necessity, not a luxury,” said a founder of a D2C electronics brand. “If your competitor drops the price of a comparable SKU by just 1%, and you don’t react within the hour, you essentially lose a full day’s worth of high-volume sales,” said another founder of a D2C beauty brand.
However, large e-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon are responding by widening their own pricing intelligence offerings to a wider range of sellers as free infrastructure. Yet investor appetite for the sector is only growing. In just the first half of 2025, such firms have raised a total of $150 million across 26 rounds, compared to $189 million raised across 32 rounds in 2024, according to Tracxn data. The sector saw its highest funding in 2021, with $466 Million across 60 rounds.