Arkansas’ Fastest-Growing Companies: Nuqleous of Bentonville Focuses on Product Development, Sustainability

Nuqleous Co-CEO Garrett Levey (Photo provided by Nuqleous)

This article is part of a series on Arkansas’ fastest-growing private companies based on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list. The list ranks companies based on three years of annual revenue growth. The other Arkansas companies featured in this series are Servato, Team Go Ventures and Telex.

Bentonville-based Nuqleous, an enterprise software company that partners with retailers and consumer goods brands to create smart solutions, has secured a spot on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list.

Founded in Bentonville in 2013 by Paul Sims and Paul Springmann, Nuqleous specializes in providing data analytics solutions for consumer packaged goods brands, aiming to increase sales and improve partnerships with retailers.

With a growth rate of 121% over the past three years, Nuqleous comes in at No. 3,822 on the list. But Nuqleous has made the Inc. 5000 list for the past four years, at No. 3,941 in 2023, No. 4,179 in 2022 and No. 2,798 in 2021.

And Nuqleous Co-CEO Garrett Levey said the company is a “bit unique” because it has “always been a profitable company from the start.”

Nuqleous declined to disclose specific revenue, but companies on the Inc. 5000 list must have generated a minimum of $100,000 in revenue in 2020 and a minimum of $2 million in revenue in 2023.

“Our source of capital has always been our customers,” Levey said in an interview with Arkansas Business. “Partnering with them and delivering value to them is what has enabled us to grow our team, enhance our products and capabilities and deliver great service to them.”

He also said that through customer interactions, Nuqleous was able to enhance solutions and offerings by seeing what inefficiencies its customers were facing. This enabled the business to grow “organically,” rather than relying on venture capital funding.

Levey and Co-CEO Bill Kloza partnered with Nuqleous in 2023 to “lead a strategic investment in the business,” though they had been involved with the company since 2013. Sims is now head of analytics innovation and Springmann is an adviser.

As co-CEOs, Levey and Kloza have focused on developing new products, going after new market segments and pursuing strategic acquisitions, which Levey said has really contributed to growth in recent years.

Another aspect of growth? Recruiting good talent. Levey said Nuqleous recruits from Bentonville, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and the Walton School of Business, where the company has an internship program.

But Nuqleous has also made recent hires from outside of Bentonville. Levey said hires like Chief Revenue Officer Haitham Ghadiry have experience scaling software companies the size of Nuqleous to “10 or 20 times the size.”

“That’s really been a core piece of our strategy, is to combine the industry domain expertise we have on the ground in Bentonville with best-in-class software operators who have seen the journey before,” Levey said.

Ghadiry said moving forward, the company envisions a combination of acquisitions and organic growth. And Levey said the company has a “pretty rigorous” vetting process for acquisitions.

“We are not in the business of collecting companies for the sake of acquiring companies,” Ghadiry said. “We are trying to build ecosystems of retailer data.”

Nuqleous acquired both TR3 Solutions of Stoneham, Massachusetts and Shiloh Technologies of Rogers in June. The company also appointed Sam Jenks as director of corporate development in August, with a focus on identifying and building relationships with potential acquisition and merger targets.

Levey said customer satisfaction is the main priority, for acquisitions and otherwise. The company has clients like Anheuser-Busch, Tyson, KraftHeinz, Unilever and Del Monte among others. Nuqleous is also partnered with large retailers like Walmart and Target with its Spotlight Retail Analytics product.

The company’s website says it has impacted more than 40.9 billion sales, but Levey and Ghadiry see a lot of growth potential in the industry, with Nuqleous at the forefront.

“We’re not done yet with innovation,” Ghadiry said. “We’re bringing a lot of exciting capabilities to the market probably on a quarterly basis.”

Ghadiry and Levey also said Nuqleous’ success is also rooted in its corporate culture and values.

“As long as you’re positioning yourself and your solutions and your business around helping customers to increase revenue or reduce costs and drive automation, you should be able to maintain that growth for a very long time to come,” Levey said. “I would expect us to be on this list going on into the future for many more years, so long as we continue that customer-centric approach.”

Nuqleous has more than 100 employees and serves more than 190 enterprise customers, with both numbers expected to grow every quarter. The company also appeared on the Inc. Best Workplaces in 2023.

“The biggest thing is staying in tune with your customers and your team,” Levey said. “If you have great culture, and the culture is around supporting your team, supporting your customers, continuing to innovate — that, in my experience, has been a recipe for success.”

Levey also emphasized the importance of sustainable growth.

“It’s not just about the next customer that you’re going to sign up or the next dollar that you’re going to bring into the business, but it’s about thinking 15 years down the line, and building a business that is not just going to be helping customers today, but for many, many years to come,” Levey said.