A Letter from Kimmo Havu, CEO of Valona Intelligence, and Jeroen Lustig, CEO & Co-founder of A-INSIGHTS
Valona Intelligence and A-INSIGHTS are joining forces to create the first platform uniting AI-driven global intelligence, quantitative market data, and deep industry expertise for globally operating enterprises. This merger brings together Valona's Forrester Wave leadership with A-INSIGHTS' specialized quantitative capabilities, serving 400+ global companies including McCain, Goodyear and Bosch — to name just a few.
A quick skim of the headlines is all one needs to find examples of the "unprecedented times" we find ourselves navigating.
Trade wars. Geopolitical tensions. Supply chain disruptions. Asymmetric regulations. Climate change.
It's enough to make anyone want to silence their push notifications. But what do you do when you're at the helm of an enterprise that has supply chains spanning five continents, product development cycles measured in years, and decisions that affect hundreds, if not thousands, of employees?
How do you plan for a world changing faster than your quarterly review can keep up with?
As the CEOs of Valona Intelligence and A-INSIGHTS, these are the kinds of questions we hear regularly from our customers. Candidly, we've been asking ourselves the same things. Which is a big part of the reason we’re joining forces to build the platform our clients in CMI, strategy, and leadership have been requesting for years.
“Our customers tell us they're making new strategy plans before the ink is dry on the previous one. Their real problem is not the uncertainty and volatility they are faced with, but a lack of process and infrastructure to keep up with it. –Jeroen Lustig, CEO and Co-founder of A-INSIGHTS
The platform Strategy and CMI teams have been waiting for
Four decades of combined experience taught us something: Strategy and CMI teams everywhere face the same core challenges. Our solution is purpose-built to solve exactly those challenges:
CMI & Strategy Challenge #1: "Something urgent landed on your desk"
If you work in Strategy or CMI, you’ll be familiar with the following scenario: An urgent request from leadership lands on your desk, and you need drop everything:
- "What's happening with that competitor's new product launch?"
- "How big is the opportunity in Southeast Asia?"
- "Why are our margins under pressure?"
Before: Days of scrambling across disconnected sources, building reports from scratch, delivering answers for a moment already passed. No one wins.
After: A-INSIGHTS' quantitative models immediately size opportunities while Valona's real-time market analysis reveals the context. Questions that used to take weeks now get precise, sharp SWOT in minutes, nuanced analysis in hours.
CMI & Strategy Challenge #2: Flip the 80/20 analysis problem
CMI teams face a fundamental problem: they spend 80% of their time collecting data and only 20% analyzing it. This means when strategic moments arrive—QBRs, board meetings, annual planning—they're delivering reports on what happened, not insights on what to do next.
We will flip this equation.
Valona's AI-powered analysis across 200,000+ sources combined with A-INSIGHTS' numerical depth, ready-to-present using our boardroom-ready reporting templates. Your intelligence teams can finally focus on the “so what” and provide solid foresights for the strategic dialogue.
Intelligence Team’s Job #3: See market shifts before they hit
To borrow some metaphors from the nautical world: CMI teams want to be confidently spotting market shifts as they appear on the horizon — not frantically rowing below deck.
Our joint solution makes this possible. When Valona's AI detects emerging competitive patterns across global markets, A-INSIGHTS' models assess financial impact. When A-INSIGHTS flags unusual performance data, Valona reveals the strategic moves driving those figures.
Now Strategy and CMI teams will be positioned in more of a strategic role: spotting market shifts before they reshape industries, bringing early signals to leadership, transforming the function from reactive to strategic.
Four key elements, one powerful solution
Our shared vision is to serve the top 1000 global companies worldwide as the international standard for intelligence. We're building the breakthrough system for strategy, and competitive and market intelligence teams.
"This merger creates a new intelligence paradigm. We're now bringing to market what the C-suite customers have been requesting for a long time: one source of truth that shows both where markets are heading and exactly how big their next opportunities are; the foresight they trust from Valona, now with the quantitative precision they need to act decisively."
– Kimmo Havu, CEO of Valona Intelligence
We will bring you an AI-powered platform that fuses world-class qualitative and quantitative datasets with deep CMI and industry expertise —providing the foundation to confidently build your future on.
Because with the right intelligence, every version of the future becomes an opportunity.
