Three decades of pricing expertise, rebuilt for the AI era.

A question that sounds simple, and rarely is

For more than thirty years, Sharat Mathur has helped consumer goods companies answer a question that sounds simple and rarely is: what should this cost, and when should it be on promotion?

He answered it for some of the biggest names in the industry. At Booz Allen Hamilton, he led the teams behind pricing and promotion transformations at Campbell Soup Company and Unilever, programs worth $40 million and $80 million in revenue. The analytics were only the beginning. The real work was changing how those companies planned, funded, measured, and decided.

Later, as Executive Vice President and Partner at IRI, a global data and analytics leader, he ran a business of 100 people across three countries. And he kept running into the same wall. Good ideas took years to reach clients. Even small changes to a legacy platform needed big budgets and long queues.

Meanwhile, the industry was shifting. More and more of its growth was coming from small and midsize brands: fast, ambitious, and largely on their own when it came to pricing. The tools built for the giants were out of their reach, and nothing affordable had been built for them.

Then AI changed what was possible. The slowest, most expensive part of the work, turning messy data into models you can trust, could finally be automated.

Sharat saw the opening. In 2022, he founded NorthLight to bring big-company pricing discipline to the brands that need it most, at the speed they move.

Built alongside the people who use it

NorthLight didn’t start with a product. It started with clients.

Our first work was consulting for private equity firms and the brands they own. Inside those companies, we saw the problem up close: pricing and promotion decisions made manually, if they were made deliberately at all, by teams without the resources the big players take for granted.

In 2023, we began building Gazelle to change that. Our first client, a baby supplement brand, went live by year end. Coffee and burger brands followed, then a food company and an electronic parts distributor.

1. 2022

   NorthLight founded as a consulting firm

2. 2023

   Gazelle development begins; first client live at year end

3. 2024

   Pilots in coffee and burger categories

4. 2025

   Promotion capability added; food and distribution clients

Every one of them made Gazelle better. Clients told us pricing alone wasn’t enough, so we added promotions. They wanted it simpler to use, so we rebuilt the interface. They needed to see the full financial picture, not just revenue, so Gazelle now covers it, along with planning, target setting, and a look back at how every promotion performed.

Disciplined by design

We built NorthLight with the same discipline we bring to client work: prove it, then grow it.

Consulting came first, and it still runs alongside the product, keeping us close to the problems clients actually have. We invest when demand is real, not ahead of it. A focused core team sets direction, a dedicated execution team in India builds and delivers, and partners like Big Chalk, who handle data harmonization, extend our reach. It’s how a lean company punches well above its weight.

Staying lean is also how we stay fast. When a client needs Gazelle to work differently, we can change it quickly, without the years-long cycles common at larger providers.

And we use AI where it earns its place