Profile / Founder & Operator
Eytan
Daniyalzade
He is moving retail's most important asset - inventory - out of the spreadsheet and into the age of AI.
He is moving retail's most important asset - inventory - out of the spreadsheet and into the age of AI.
Walk into any store and you see the polished part: the products, the checkout, the app. Eytan Daniyalzade spends his days on the part nobody sees - the decision, made weeks or months earlier, about what to buy, how much, and where to send it. Get that wrong and the polish does not matter. His company, Toolio, is the software that helps retailers get it right.
Toolio is a New York-based cloud platform for merchandise planning, forecasting, and allocation. Instead of the tangle of spreadsheets that still runs much of the industry, it gives planning teams a single, data-driven system to decide what to stock and when to reorder. More than 100 retailers use it, among them Rothy's, Chubbies, and Mack Weldon. Along the way the platform has managed over $1 billion in inventory.
Daniyalzade is the co-founder and CEO. He is a Stanford-trained electrical engineer who passed through McKinsey and Microsoft early on, then built and sold a company to Walmart, then spent five years inside that giant before deciding the biggest opportunity was the one he kept bumping into from the inside: planning was still done by hand.
Inventory was the one piece of the retail stack that wasn't elevated to the cloud.EYTAN DANIYALZADE
The path to Toolio ran through Walmart. In 2014, Walmart Labs acquired Stylr, the store-search app Daniyalzade had co-founded with Berk Atikoglu after it reached hundreds of thousands of users. Rather than cash out and leave, the pair stayed. Over the next five years Daniyalzade led omni-channel and digital initiatives at Walmart eCommerce, helping deliver technologies that reached millions - Sam's Club Scan & Go and Walmart Pay among them.
That vantage point is where the next idea came from. Even at Walmart's scale, core merchandise planning ran on spreadsheets. "They wanted to make it data-driven and were investing in resources internally," he told TechCrunch. "We realized there was a gap and left Walmart in 2019 to democratize the next planning platform."
He and Atikoglu had by then been building together for the better part of a decade. Toolio became their second act - this time aimed not at shoppers but at the planners behind the scenes. The company raised an $8 million Series A in 2021 led by Jump Capital, with Rho Capital's Ignition Fund, Founder Collective, Notation Capital, and Max Ventures joining, bringing total funding to about $10.3 million.
For a retailer, inventory is the single largest bet on the balance sheet. Toolio treats it as the thing to plan around, not an afterthought bolted onto a POS system.
Even the largest retailers plan by hand. Daniyalzade's thesis is that better data and better tooling let a small team make decisions that once took a room of analysts.
A line he used in 2021 that only aged into relevance after the supply-chain shocks that followed. Toolio was built to respond to demand in real time.
A preview clip of Eytan Daniyalzade in conversation about retail planning, allocation, and where merchandising is heading.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Toolio, a cloud-based retail merchandise planning platform based in New York. He previously co-founded Stylr, which Walmart acquired, and worked at Walmart eCommerce.
Toolio is a cloud and AI-powered merchandise planning, forecasting, and allocation platform used by more than 100 retailers, including Rothy's, Chubbies, and Mack Weldon.
He co-founded Stylr (sold to Walmart in 2014), then led omni-channel and digital initiatives at Walmart eCommerce, including work on Sam's Club Scan & Go and Walmart Pay. Earlier he was at Chartbeat, Adap.tv, McKinsey, and Microsoft.
He earned both a BS and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Toolio raised an $8M Series A led by Jump Capital in 2021, bringing total funding to about $10.3 million.