Tag: Power Partners 2025

Mom-and-pop businesses are often the lifeblood of their communities, but they’re not typically associated with the latest cutting-edge technology. That might be changing.

A new wave of tech companies is helping small brick-and-mortar businesses stay up to date, on everything from pricing to inventory control. Using tools such as augmented reality and AI, these companies are helping the small establishments in our communities not only stay afloat, but thrive. 

Restaurants have always been known for razor-thin margins, but they now face added pressures from inflation, tariffs, and continued lower customer traffic. Fortunately, companies such as MarginEdge are there for support. The Arlington, Virginia-based software firm helps restaurants with invoicing and bill payment, forecasting sales, labor needs, and more.

Since the start of 2020, restaurant costs have risen by 30 percent, according to a May report by the National Restaurant Association, which noted restaurants typically have a mere 5 percent pre-tax margin. Sometimes a single ingredient makes the difference between being in the red or in the black. Using MarginEdge’s software, restaurant operators can input recipes for instant estimates of costs and profits based on ingredients, regions, and vendors. They can also receive restaurant-specific suggestions for adjusting products, prices, and proportions. 

“If you notice avocado prices have dropped, maybe you run a guacamole special,” says MarginEdge chief revenue officer Tara Clever. “Or if you see avocado prices have jumped, then maybe you take your avocado burger off the menu for the next two weeks.”

With the company’s software, restaurants can also track expenses and create budgets. And AI-powered tools automate invoices and create sales forecasts. These features, Clever says, allow restaurant owners to simplify their back-end operations and “adjust to this new world.” 

Like restaurants, small alcohol brands and craft brewers face their own unique headwinds. There to guide the way are companies such as Drinks, a Glendale, California-based firm founded in 2013 as a direct-to-consumer business that has since become a SaaS tool designed to help businesses sell alcohol on their existing websites.

One side of Drinks’ business is focused on helping online retailers including Thrive Market and Misfits Market sell alcohol online without needing their own licenses. Licensed suppliers still sell the products, but Drinks operates as a third-party facilitator and routes the orders, calculates taxes, verifies ages, and follows shipping restrictions.

The other side of Drinks’ business is focused on keeping retailers and alcohol companies, from craft beer brands to liquor makers like the nonalcoholic spirit brand Ritual Zero Proof, legally compliant while selling their goods through the e-commerce platform Shopify. This allows small beer, wine, and liquor brands to compete with giants that usually get more attention from distributors, says Drinks co-founder and CEO Zac Brandenberg

“This is an industry that has just discovered the wheel,” says Brandenberg. “Everyone else knows you meet the consumer where they are. You don’t sit back and insist that they do it your way. That’s how you lose. There are so many businesses that have been massively disrupted by putting their foot down” and refusing to change and sell online.

Drinks also built and patented its own AI engine to help predict alcohol sales based on label design and consumer data—a potential benefit for any alcohol brand, but especially for winemakers vying to stand out among the approximately 100,000 wine labels registered in the U.S. each year.

“Consumer behavior [in this industry] is, to provide a pun here, unquenchable,” says Brandenberg. “They’re constantly looking for something new.” Drinks’ software helps companies provide that for customers while transforming it from guesswork to something more like science.

Another firm bringing the AI boom to Main Street is Trax, which provides in-store analysis for both CPG brands and retailers. The Boston-based company uses image recognition technology to help brands analyze their sales and track inventory blind spots. A local convenience store could upload a photo of its snack aisle, and Trax will provide an analysis of factors like product positioning, availability, and pricing that same day.

“This data really helps you to find that ROI very clearly,” says Rifka Bernstein Dinesman, Trax’s VP of sales for the Americas. “When you have out-of-stock items or don’t have the right product in the store, you’re losing sales.”

Flying Embers, a canned cocktail and hard kombucha brand, used Trax to measure its product availability and visibility in more than 900 stores. When it learned that between 15 and 20 percent of locations were breaking up its four-packs, the brand decided to introduce a single-can option. 

Trax is also using augmented reality to enable brands to check on products and in-store conditions at retailers. In the future, these capabilities will be available to consumers too.  For instance, by holding up their phone, a customer could be pointed toward a specific kind of product in a crowded aisle. 

“Imagine you can just go scan the beer aisle and then it will highlight all the gluten-free beers,” says Bernstein Dinesman. “That’s the world we’re entering.”

Influencer marketing can be a challenge for business owners. Working with content creators can be expensive, time-consuming, and—worst of all—risky. It’s not uncommon for marketing teams to shell out thousands of dollars to influencers in exchange for social media posts that result in sparse engagement and shockingly few sales. 

Still, if done right, influencer marketing can help elevate a small business into a household name. Just this year, better-for-you soda brand Poppi sold to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion after blowing up on TikTok. 

Fortunately, plenty of social media startups and traditional public relations firms are making it easier for brands to navigate this space and turn a profit.

Agentio co-founders Arthur Leopold and Jonathan Meyers, for example, know the creator economy can be a confusing place. That’s why, in 2023, they launched a platform that solves many of the pain points businesses face when partnering with YouTubers. The Brooklyn, New York-based company uses AI to match brands with pre-vetted YouTube creators and allows them to place a bid for an ad read in one of their upcoming videos. When the video goes live, brands can use the platform to track their ad’s performance and license the content to use in their own advertisements.

Leopold, Agentio’s CEO, says YouTubers are so valuable because they keep their audience’s attention for long stretches of time. “You sit down to watch a YouTube creator for 30 minutes—you’re not just doom-scrolling,” he says. “And because of that, they have incredible conversion power.” After switching from traditional YouTube ads to Agentio-powered ad reads, sock brand Bombas achieved a 5.3 times higher return on ad spend. 

Venice, California-based Superfiliate, meanwhile, aims to help marketing teams spend their budgets more efficiently. Co-founders Anders Bill and Andy Cloyd launched the influencer marketing platform in 2021 as a tool for brands to track the success of affiliate marketing campaigns in which content creators earn commissions through product links and discount codes they share with their audiences.

Superfiliate has since expanded to become “a full funnel management system for all the ways that brands work with creators,” according to Cloyd, the company’s CEO. Through the platform, businesses can find creators to work with, manage partnerships, view performance analytics, and automate payments. 

Last year, Superfiliate introduced new technology that allows brands to quantify which high-consideration purchases are influenced by creator-led campaigns. It allows businesses to track—“within the realms of privacy,” Cloyd says—if customers buy an item up to 30 days after getting exposed to an influencer marketing campaign. According to Cloyd, one Superfiliate client discovered that “the old tech paradigm” missed more than 40 percent of the purchases prompted by influencer campaigns. “If all I had was that initial technology, my ROI on that partnership would be very different,” he adds.

Founders who don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on paid posts can generate buzz online through other avenues. That’s where Analog Events comes in. Founded by Jordan Kaye in 2016, the Beverly Hills, California-based company plans brand events and gifts its clients’ products to influencers. 

Analog goes above and beyond when dealing with influencers. The key, according to Kaye, is to “give them space to play.” For example, the company has in the past created at-home dinner party sets to send to content creators on behalf of a streaming service client. Influencers received re-heatable, chef-made food served in Le Creuset cookware, as well as table settings presented on a bar cart. As a result, 85 percent of the content creators posted about the experience without being paid to do so.

Traditional public relations companies are embracing influencer marketing too. At New York City-based Kite Hill, this often means working with journalists, content creators, and podcasters for the same campaign. Tiffany Guarnaccia, the PR firm’s founder and CEO, says she’s also seen sharply rising “demand for executives to almost be influencers in their own right.” Kite Hill has met this demand by helping create social media posts for CEOs. Guarnaccia says she often tells executives: “Your LinkedIn is better than your press page.”

Meanwhile, Rye Brook, New York-based Illumination PR vets influencers for its health care- and wellness-focused client base. Founder and CEO Robyn Bordes isn’t afraid to tell clients when they’re inking a partnership with the wrong influencer. When a medical spa business told her it wanted to work with a celebrity rather than partnering with influencers, she recalls telling them, “You’re not going to see the ROI that you’re looking for.” 

The company went through with the partnership anyway, she says, and didn’t get results. For its next influencer campaign, the med spa came back to Illumination, and Bordes instead gave a discount code to a local mom who had a small social media following. That, she says, netted the client its biggest-ever influencer marketing ROI. 

Sometimes, it’s not about partnering with the most-followed creator you can afford, but rather working with “the more attainable type of person,” Bordes says—because consumers can look at their content and say, “I can do that too.”

Getting exposure for your brand is an important part of your marketing strategy. Some experts advise small businesses to spend 7 to 8 percent of their revenue on marketing. In today’s inflation-squeezed economy, however, many businesses can’t afford to put a significant portion of their budgets into marketing campaigns that fall flat.

Luckily, Inc.’s annual Power Partners list highlights the best-in-class companies that focus on advertising and marketing so you don’t have to. That means everything from what you see on TV and billboards to influencer marketing and search engines, even as marketing faces its own changing landscape.

Things like art direction are best left to the artists. Take the New York- and Copenhagen-based design and branding agency YummyColours’s campaign for Shopify, which helped the e-commerce company break into European markets, or the Houston-based events services company Innovative Environments’ signage campaigns that helped earned it a partnership with the Houston Zoo.

Or let’s say you’re worried about search engine optimization. You can’t ignore it, even if changes in search engines may be on the way in the next few years. The Seattle-based SEO agency Compose.ly’s work scaling written articles has helped grow web traffic for sites such as Next Level Urgent Care and Trava Security. Next Level Urgent Care said Compose.ly went “the extra mile by building out a custom dashboard, allowing [us] to track progress toward those goals in real time. Their commitment to transparency, especially around KPIs, is a reflection of the effort they put in day after day.”

Sometimes your company is doing all the right things, but you might not know exactly how to tell people. New York City-based Ideas on Purpose worked with Disney, with Disney praising the “caliber of design expertise” IOP brought to its Sustainability & Social Impact Report. Also in New York City, 5WPR’s small town beautification campaign for Sparkling Ice helped both brands focus on socially aware community driven initiatives. In today’s marketplace, climate change and community efforts are major consumer concerns, and these Power Partners managed to recognize those needs in advertising and marketing.

Whether it’s branding, communications, or UX/UI design, there are plenty of Power Partners on our list that stand out for their positive impact on their clients.

President Trump’s tariffs are projected to cost midsize businesses $82 billion this year. The duties now cover dozens of countries and have pushed average U.S. rates toward 20 percent, the highest in a century. But despite this threat to companies’ bottom lines, small-business optimism has risen since summer, suggesting some companies have found ways to adapt.

One emerging advantage: Logistics companies turning supply chain planning into real-time intelligence. These firms help founders model scenarios, test routes, and switch suppliers as policies shift. The tools can’t eliminate volatility, but they can help businesses get ahead of constant policy change.

Modeling the unpredictable

When trade policy shifts overnight, Optilogic‘s new tool, Lumina Tariff Optimizer, responds in real time. The Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company feeds live tariff data from sources including the tax and compliance firm Avalara into supply chain models, showing companies such as Coca-Cola and Whirlpool how to adapt to changing rates.

“Lumina allows clients to model hundreds of scenarios in the cloud: by product, lane, supplier, or region,” says founder and CEO Don Hicks. “It’s not about getting the perfect answer—it’s about being able to run simulations in minutes, see the impact across sourcing, transportation, and inventory, and know where the tipping points are.”

Earlier this year, a global oilfield equipment manufacturer faced sudden tariff increases and turned to Lumina. Within three days, the company had explored refund options, shifted suppliers to closer locations, and adjusted inventory, preventing an $8 million hit.

In the past year, the company closed a $40 million Series B to launch Lumina and other tools including: Leapfrog AI, enabling non-coders to build and analyze models; Enterprise Teams, for cross-functional collaboration; and Supernova Cloud Solve Technology, which powers supply chain models for companies such as General Motors.

“Uncertainty is the new norm. If you’re planning for stability, you’re already behind,” says Hicks. “That’s what we’re building for: a world where every supply chain decision is a high-stakes investment decision. Optilogic helps companies get out ahead, even if long-term forecasting feels shaky.”

When every ingredient becomes a business decision

Keychain started as a faster way to connect brands with U.S. manufacturers. But the New York City-based platform—co-founded by CEO Oisin Hanrahan, Umang Dua, and Jordan Weitz—has become essential for companies rethinking supply chains.

“Tariffs forced a reckoning,” Hanrahan says. “Companies started looking not just at where things were made, but what they were made of.” 

Keychain now serves more than 30,000 U.S. manufacturers and 20,000 brands and retailers. Companies input product specs—say, a protein bar with certain nutrition targets—and receive vetted supplier matches with projected costs, margins, and lead times.

Component-level visibility matters because tariffs often hit raw materials first. A 20 percent duty on bottle caps can destroy margins on beverages, even if the liquid is tariff-free.

Brands access Keychain for free, while manufacturers pay to reach customers. “It’s a 24/7 trade show,” Hanrahan says. “Except instead of someone walking by your booth, you’re being matched based on real product demand.”

Keychain has also added compliance tools for food safety audits, Food and Drug Administration filings, and production planning. At a time when a missed audit can shut down a line and incomplete paperwork can strand shipments at the border, what once may have been routine checkboxes are now make-or-break functions.

Ripple effects on the road

Bitfreighter operates at the ground level of logistics. The Nashville company, co-founded by Brad Perling and Brandon Joyce, builds software for freight brokers—the intermediaries that match shippers with trucking companies for domestic transport.

Bitfreighter automates the administrative work of freight brokerage: generating quotes, booking loads, tracking shipments, and handling invoices. The platform charges flat monthly fees, not percentages of each transaction. “So, our customers don’t get hit with surprise costs when volume shifts up or down,” says Perling, Bitfreighter’s CEO.

Freight brokers, also called third-party logistics companies or 3PLs, coordinate shipments across thousands of trucking companies. For manufacturers without transportation networks of their own, 3PLs handle capacity, carrier compliance, and documentation.

“Most of our customers are moving domestic freight, so they’re not hit directly by tariffs,” says Perling. “But they’re absolutely feeling the ripple effects.”

Perling expects more tariff-related pressure on domestic freight by early 2026. Companies shifting production back to the U.S. or rushing imports before duty hikes will compete for the same trucks and warehouses. “If tariffs stay volatile,” he says, “you’re going to see a squeeze on domestic capacity. Even if your product is made here, getting it to the shelf is going to cost more.”

In 2025, tariffs have pushed logistics out of the back office and into the center of strategy. With procurement cycles often stretching for months while policies can shift overnight, founders need tools that help them see around corners. Fortunately, there are tech companies here to help—and, in the process, make managing supply chains much less scary. 

The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.