Meagan Kinmonth Bowman, founder and CEO of Stonehenge Technology Labs, provider of Stopwatch.
Stonehenge Technology Labs of Bentonville, provider of a business-to-business software platform for consumer packaged goods companies, has grabbed the spotlight.
Stonehenge’s platform, Stopwatch, was the top software project featured by Microsoft on stage last month at its Microsoft Visual Studio 25th Anniversary Event, a developers conference in Seattle broadcast worldwide. Stonehenge uses Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2022 programming tool to manage back-end processes.
That honor came on the heels of founder and CEO Meagan Kinmonth Bowman being named the 2021 Innovator of the Year in emerging tech trends at the annual Northwest Arkansas Tech Summit.
Stonehenge Technology Labs spun off in 2019 from OneStone Solutions Group, an e-commerce intelligence firm Bowman co-founded in 2017.
Stopwatch was designed to pull together public and private data in a way that allows every employee of a consumer packaged goods company to look at the same information needed to run the business, Bowman said. Its goal is to help companies reach consumers wherever they are, online or in stores.
For example, Bowman said, if you’re in charge of placing orders, getting goods shipped, handling social media or dealing with analytics, you know those parts of the business. But “nothing from a base data layer is consistent across the organization,” she said. “And that’s a huge problem, right?”
Most consumer packaged goods companies work with outdated software, she said, suggesting they need more intuitive software like Stopwatch to understand and reach today’s consumers, she said.
The company says its subscription software can deliver “integrated and actionable” results within 20 days.
The company has raised more than $5 million from investors, including IrishAngels Inc. of Chicago; Bread & Butter Ventures of St. Paul, Minnesota; Gaingels LLC of New York; Angeles Investors of Chicago; Bonfire Ventures of Los Angeles; and Red Tail Ventures LLC of New York, according to a news release.
“Our big thing with investors is we’re 100% committed to a diverse cap table,” Bowman told Arkansas Business. “So the money that we’ve taken is really strategic in terms of ensuring that our board and cap table and employee base are diverse from socioeconomic to race to gender identity,” Bowman said. “That’s the strategy we’ve played. And it’s been a really interesting fundraising journey because it’s hard to find those people.”
Without naming them, she said that in the past year Stonehenge has secured multi-year contracts with Fortune 100 consumer packaged goods companies. She said Stopwatch has more than 20,000 users at more than a dozen companies.
Bowman also said that while the company is not profitable, it is growing, doubling revenue month-over-month. Again, she didn’t disclose those figures. The company has gone from eight employees to 20 since December, “and we continue to kind of build at that pace,” she said.
Here’s Microsoft’s vide on Bowman’s company:
Moving to NWA
Bowman moved to northwest Arkansas in 2013 “sight unseen,” with a vision of starting a company to serve a cluster of consumer packaged goods companies. There are 1,200 CPG company offices in the region, Bowman said.
“We knew that, if Walmart and other aggressive platforms — Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Chewy.com, eBay — began to chip away at Amazon’s market share, that there would be a really, really interesting mathematical intersection for consumer goods companies,” she said.
Bowman previously did consulting work for large CPG companies. She said she helped integrate, as “a code monkey,” another of Jet.com founder Marc Lore’s companies, Quidsi, a.k.a. Diapers.com, into online retail giant Amazon. Walmart later bought Jet.com.
She also led e-commerce at The Harvest Group of Rogers and served as group director at The MARS Agency for clients that included Campbell Soup, Colgate-Palmolive and Sun Products. Bowman worked from Bentonville for both companies.
She has led product development, digital integration and e-commerce retail strategy at Hallmark Cards subsidiaries DaySpring and Crayola as well.
Bowman is a member of the Fast Company Executive Board, Forbes Technology Council, Sam M. Walton College of Business Entrepreneurship Advisory Council and the Data Science Curriculum Board at the University of Arkansas.
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