An American success often hides a diaspora success. In the case of Predictix it goes far beyond that.

Predictix, a US-based retail cloud provider with 160 employees yesterday announced they were acquired by Infor, another US cloud applications provider. The news comes five months after Infor invested $25 million in its now acquisition.

The diaspora effect in this company is Tunisian: Predictix had “Tunisian DNA” said Walid Mnif, one of the first employees and now head of the global consulting team.

The provider of cloud-native, predictive and prescriptive analytics retail solutions was founded by American Molham Aref and Tunisian Hatem Sellami, in Atlanta, US, in 2005. Of first 10 employees, four were Tunisians based in Atlanta.

When three of those employees decided to move back to Tunisia, Predictix opened an office in Tunis in 2008. The office is an extension to the US and European offices, so each team is composed of a mix of Tunisians, Europeans, and Americans. Sellami exited the company in 2014.

Since then, the Tunis office has been breeding Tunisians engineers right out of school. It now counts 80 employees and many Tunisians trained by Predictix are now senior architects and taking on leadership positions within multi-million dollars projects, Mnif said.

"The Tunisian team was key to the success of Predictix," CEO Aref told Wamda. "The fact that our Tunisian colleagues speak English, French and Arabic and our office in Tunis is geographically well placed, gives us the flexibility to serve clients in Europe, the US, and the Middle East."

It's just the beginning for the Tunisian office.

“For Predictix Tunisia, we plan on expanding the office to start serving the new business coming in, as well as serving new needs coming in from Infor across all 13 industries it serves, not just retail,” Mnif said.  

Predictix applications use big bata and advanced analytics to solve the toughest problems in merchandise planning, assortment, category management, forecasting, pricing, and supply chain optimization. They work with three of the top 10 US retailers and five of the top 15 global retailers.