A shopping cart is a rather late place to begin getting acquainted. By the time a customer puts something in it, they may have wandered through several categories, considered a different color, checked a price and left half a dozen clues. The cart records a decision. Much of the interesting business happened on the way there.
Fayez Mohamood built a company around that earlier part of the conversation. While working in loyalty technology, he noticed that retailers understood plenty about customer behavior but were making less use of the other half of the transaction: their own changing product catalogs. A person was browsing something specific. The specificity mattered.
He co-founded Bluecore in 2013 with Mahmoud Arram and Max Bennett. The practical opening was familiar to anyone who has waited for an enterprise software project: sending a timely, relevant email could demand an unreasonable amount of technical work. Mohamood and Arram developed a JavaScript integration to capture product attributes and shopper behavior as they changed.
That origin gives his career a pleasingly unfashionable center. Before the funding rounds and the language of artificial intelligence, there was an engineer irritated by a connection that ought to exist. Retailers had the products. They had the visitors. Making those two bodies of knowledge useful together became the job.
Before the inbox, the processor
His route into marketing ran through computer engineering. Mohamood studied computer engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, then earned a master’s in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech in 2006. His thesis concerned instruction fetching in simultaneous multithreaded processors. It was some distance from deciding which shirt to recommend.
The research had already attracted attention. In September 2005, Georgia Tech’s MARS laboratory recorded his Best Paper award at the second IBM PAC2 conference, for work co-authored with Mrinmoy Ghosh and Hsien-Hsin S. Lee. Long before retail became his subject, he was studying how a system behaves beneath its visible surface.
His professional stops included AMD, where he worked on microprocessor design and simulation, and MathWorks, where he worked on graphical frameworks for MATLAB and Simulink. Later, as head of product at BigDoor, the subject shifted toward loyalty and retention. The distance between chips and shopping narrowed through the everyday problem of interpreting activity.
There were smaller ventures, too: Gameday Tycoon, a Facebook fantasy sports game, and Sponty, a service for discovering local music events. They belong in the picture because a career can look tidier backward than it felt going forward. His work passed through games, events and loyalty before settling into the particular demands of retail.
“Retail is about winning every day.”
Fayez Mohamood
Three kinds of knowing
The Bluecore idea becomes clearer if you imagine a shopkeeper who remembers both a customer and the stockroom. Knowing a shopper’s name helps. Knowing what they examined helps more. Knowing that the item has changed price, returned to stock or acquired a plausible alternative gives the shopkeeper something useful to say.
Bluecore organized its platform around three connected sets of information: shopper identity, shopper behavior and the product catalog. The point was to turn those connections into communications while they still mattered. An elaborate understanding of yesterday’s browsing can arrive just in time to explain a sale somebody else made.
Mohamood’s early account of selling the technology contains a revealing difficulty. Some marketers doubted the system could do what it promised, so the team had to show them its internal workings. The engineering became part of the demonstration. A useful invention sometimes needs to overcome the customer’s entirely reasonable experience of how slowly everything else works.
His insistence on retail also shaped his view of software categories. In 2020, he treated customer data management as a capability rather than a sufficient category in itself. Joining data together was valuable when it solved a retailer’s problem. The catalog, with its changing assortment and product relationships, gave that work its particular meaning.
There is a distinction here worth keeping. A database can tell you that two records belong together. A merchant needs to decide what to do with the connection. Mohamood kept pulling the discussion toward that next decision: what a shopper might want, when to communicate, and whether the contact would help bring them back.
A company grows between conversations
The early business operated under the name TriggerMail. FirstMark investor Amish Jani encountered its founders through Techstars and later described an initially focused product with clear returns. His recollection of the growing company included an unusually apt detail: its Lower East Side office occupied an old speakeasy. An enterprise software business had found premises with a previous career in persuasion.
New York was a considered choice. Mohamood argued that a startup needed customers and access to talent, and that the city offered both for a business selling to retailers. The reasoning was refreshingly geographical. A company’s address could follow the people who would buy its product and the people who would help sell it.
Growth made the personnel questions harder. By 2017, Bluecore had expanded from roughly 50 employees to more than 100 in ten months. Recruiting could no longer be an occasional interruption to building the product. Building the organization had become a substantial product of its own.
By 2020, Mohamood described his CEO work as a mixture of recruiting, guiding product development and spending time with customers. He also wanted a place in new-employee onboarding. Those choices bring a founder’s responsibilities into focus: explaining why the company exists, then listening closely enough to notice when its explanation needs revising.
He made room for those conversations in a small, literal way. In 2018 he described preferring 45-minute meetings, leaving a quarter-hour before the next appointment. The calendar trick has none of the glamour of a new financing round. It does, however, acknowledge that a person arriving at a meeting may benefit from having finished the previous one.
The second purchase is the plot
In August 2021, Bluecore announced a $125 million Series E at a $1 billion valuation. Georgian led the round, joined by existing investors FirstMark and Norwest and new investor Silver Lake Waterman. The distinction matters: the headline number belongs to the company, at that financing, rather than serving as a measure of its founder’s personal fortune.
The business case remained rooted in repeat purchasing. Winning a first order is only the beginning of a customer relationship; the next order asks whether the retailer has remained relevant. Mohamood’s attention stayed on the information that could make that continued relationship more useful, rather than treating every communication as a fresh introduction.
Norwest’s Scott Beechuk, who met Mohamood during the 2017 Series C process, described a shared interest in more individualized shopping experiences. Their connection began partly in common engineering and product backgrounds. The company that started with a focused email application had become a broader retail marketing platform.
Mohamood also founded the DTC Collective, a forum for digital retail executives. The impulse fits his working method: bring people with concrete commercial problems into conversation. Software supplies one means of exchanging information. A room full of retailers can supply another, particularly when each is trying to understand a change that exceeds any single company.
When the shopper can ask back
In November 2024, Bluecore acquired alby, an AI shopping assistant. The deal brought an original collaborator back into the story: alby’s CEO, Max Bennett, was also a Bluecore co-founder. Bennett returned to lead its evolution inside Bluecore. The new application approached the catalog through questions a shopper could actually ask.
Would a tent be easy to put up? Would a snowboard suit a particular kind of use? Browsing shows interest; a question can reveal the reservation preventing a purchase. Bluecore’s announcement described conversational tools that could anticipate questions as well as answer them, adding another kind of information to the existing shopper relationship.
The ambition extended beyond a shopping assistant. Mohamood discussed future applications in marketing, merchandising and support. It was a continuation of his original concern with making product knowledge useful, now with the shopper able to participate more explicitly in the exchange. A click leaves evidence. A question supplies words.
The organizational challenge came with it. In 2024, Mohamood and entrepreneur Matt Blumberg discussed running a substantial core business while preserving room for experiments. Established operations need reliable processes; uncertain ideas need permission to change. Giving both kinds of work the same rules would make one of them unnecessarily difficult.
A further step arrived in February 2026 with Marketing Agent, designed to help retail teams interpret performance and identify actions. Mohamood described the demand as help understanding results, rather than an appetite for “another dashboard or another AI widget.” The proposed customer benefit was time recovered from analysis and reporting.
The connection continues
On May 13, 2026, Bluecore announced its acquisition by Insider One. The announcement identified Mohamood as Bluecore’s co-founder and CEO and positioned Bluecore’s identification and behavioral data alongside Insider One’s customer engagement infrastructure. Thirteen years after the founding, the company entered a different ownership chapter.
The scale of the underlying activity was considerable: the acquisition announcement described Bluecore’s identity network as processing more than 10 billion shopper events daily. Yet the practical question beneath that number remained recognizable. Which signals help a retailer understand a person well enough to make the next interaction useful?
Mohamood has also performed improv at Unexpected Productions. The detail belongs beside the processor papers: both are parts of a person whose working life has crossed some unexpectedly different rooms. Engineering, performance and the business of selling software have each had a place in it.
Even his introduction comes with instructions. He explains that his name sounds like “fries” without the “r,” in one syllable. It is a compact act of consideration, removing a small obstacle before the conversation begins. After a career spent connecting shoppers, products and colleagues, he still offers the simplest possible place to start: here is how to say hello.