Alexandr Galkin

Co-Founder & CEO Competera

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Alexandr Galkin co-founded Competera in 2017 with Alexander Sazonov and leads it as Chief Executive Officer. Competera sells AI-driven price optimisation to enterprise retailers, and its position rests on a specific technical disagreement with the rest of the category. Most retail pricing software is built around elasticity — how demand moves when price moves — and around competitor matching, which reduces pricing to a reactive exercise. Competera’s engine weighs more than twenty pricing drivers, aiming to model why a customer buys rather than only how they respond to a number, and to produce a price that reflects both competitive position and perceived value. Galkin frames the goal in organisational terms: turning retail teams from pricing executors into pricing decision-makers. The company works with around fifty retailers across eighteen countries and twelve industries — Sephora, iHerb, Flaconi, Lyreco, Novus, Wilko and AUTODOC among them — from offices in San Mateo, London and Singapore.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Competera in 2017 alongside Alexander Sazonov, now the company’s Chief Operating Officer, and has led it as Chief Executive Officer since.
• Built a pricing engine that evaluates more than twenty pricing drivers beyond elasticity, designed to make pricing a decision rather than a reaction.
• Grew to around fifty retail clients across eighteen countries and twelve industries, including Sephora, iHerb, Flaconi, Lyreco, Novus, Wilko and AUTODOC.
• Established offices in San Mateo, California; London; and Singapore.
• Named an Inc. 5000 honouree, among the fastest-growing private companies in America, in both 2025 and 2026.
• Listed as a representative vendor in Gartner’s 2024 Market Guide for retail pricing solutions.
• Won Best Breakthrough Technology Solution at the 2023 VIP Awards and Best Retail Insights Solution at the 2024 VIP Awards.
• Brought more than twelve years of retail consulting and auditing experience into the company at its founding.

Professional Journey

Galkin spent more than twelve years in retail consulting and auditing before founding Competera. No employer from that period is named in any source located, and none is asserted here — but the shape of the experience matters to what he built. Auditing and consulting in retail mean living inside the gap between what a retailer’s numbers say and what is actually happening on the shelf, and pricing is where that gap is widest and most expensive.

He founded Competera in 2017 with Alexander Sazonov, who came from a real estate and operations background and became the company’s Chief Operating Officer. The founding thesis was that retail pricing software had settled for the wrong problem. Competitive price monitoring — knowing what a rival charges and matching it — had become a commodity, and it produces a race to the bottom because every participant is reacting to every other. Elasticity modelling was better but still narrow, treating price as the only variable that matters to a buyer.

Competera’s approach was to widen the model: evaluate more than twenty pricing drivers, understand why a customer buys, predict how they will react to a change, and set a price reflecting both competitive position and customer-perceived value. That is a harder machine-learning problem and a harder sale, because it asks a retailer to trust a recommendation it cannot fully reason about — which is why the company pairs the platform with pricing consulting and management support rather than selling software alone, and why Galkin’s framing is about moving teams from executing prices to owning the decision.

The customer base reflects the breadth the model claims: beauty and personal care with Sephora, iHerb and Flaconi, workplace supplies with Lyreco, grocery with Novus, general merchandise with Wilko, automotive parts with AUTODOC — around fifty retailers across eighteen countries and twelve industries. The company expanded geographically to match, opening in San Mateo in the United States, London and Singapore.

Recognition has followed the growth. Gartner listed Competera as a representative vendor in its 2024 Market Guide for retail pricing, a meaningful signal for enterprise buyers whose procurement processes lean on analyst coverage. The company won Best Breakthrough Technology Solution at the 2023 VIP Awards and Best Retail Insights Solution the following year, and was named an Inc. 5000 honouree in both 2025 and 2026, placing it among the fastest-growing private companies in America in consecutive years.

Education

No education record for Alexandr Galkin was found in any source examined, including Competera’s own about page, which describes his experience only as more than twelve years in retail consulting and auditing. It is left unstated here rather than inferred.