Reading the Shop Floor Like a Website
Online retailers have always known their conversion rate to the decimal point. They know how many people landed on a page, how long they stayed, and where they abandoned the cart. Physical stores, for most of their history, knew one number - what rang up at the till - and guessed at everything before it. Kepler Analytics exists to close that gap.
Founded in Melbourne in 2015 by David Mah, Kepler builds discreet, AI-powered sensors that mount inside a store and quietly measure the flow of people: how many pass by the window, how many step inside, how long they linger, and what share ultimately convert into a sale. That raw signal is piped into a cloud platform - the Kepler Insights Platform - that turns it into daily, comparable numbers a store manager or a head-office team can actually act on.
The future of high-performance retail.— Kepler Analytics company tagline
The premise is simple and slightly uncomfortable for retail: most of the people who matter to a store never buy anything, and until recently no one counted them. If 1,000 people walk past a shopfront and 100 come in and 20 buy, the store's real problem might be the window, not the product. Kepler's whole business is built on making those invisible numbers visible, then attaching them to decisions - staffing, layout, merchandising, and where to open the next door.
Who uses it
Kepler's customers are brick-and-mortar retailers, from specialty chains to enterprise brands, and the company reports serving roughly 500 companies operating more than 30,000 store locations across 35 countries. What began as an Australian and New Zealand story now spans North America, Europe and Asia - an expansion the company accelerated after its 2022 funding round and its acquisition of US traffic-analytics firm Countwise.
For those retailers, the pitch is concrete rather than aspirational. Kepler says clients typically achieve about +6% in sales growth within six months of implementation - not from new stores or new stock, but from acting on traffic and conversion data they were previously walking past.
The problems it solves
Three questions sit underneath most of Kepler's tools. Is this store converting the traffic it already gets? Where in the store are shoppers going - and where are they not? And, before signing a lease, how much passer-by traffic does a prospective site actually have, and what sales might that realistically produce? Kepler's Store Location Intelligence tool answers the last one by modelling passer-by counts against projected conversion, turning a seven-figure lease decision into something closer to a forecast than a hunch.
Unlock high performance in your retail stores.— Kepler Analytics
How it is different
People-counting is not a new category - competitors such as RetailNext, Sensormatic's ShopperTrak and V-Count have been in the market for years. Kepler's distinction is less about the sensor alone and more about the pairing of proprietary hardware with an analytics layer aimed squarely at one outcome: store sales growth. The company describes its team as a mix of retail experts, hardware engineers, software developers, data scientists and operations specialists, with a stated preference for solutions that are "powerful yet practical and easy to implement." The company also publishes the Kepler Retail Market Index, a monthly benchmark of foot traffic across Australia and New Zealand that doubles as a public pulse-check on the high street - and quiet proof that Kepler sits on a large, comparable data set.
The business behind it
Kepler runs a B2B SaaS model with a hardware component: retailers pay recurring subscription fees for the analytics platform, bundled with the in-store sensors, and revenue scales with the number of stores and sensors deployed across a network. It is a model that rewards depth - the more of a retailer's estate Kepler instruments, the more benchmarking and network-optimisation value it can offer back.
That model has attracted investment. In February 2022 Kepler raised an AUD$22 million Series B (about USD$15.5M) led by OneVentures, with participation from Whiteoak, Taronga Ventures, Shearwater Capital, Reinventure Group and InterValley Ventures. The company said it would use the capital for key hires, new product features and global expansion - driven, it noted, by rising demand in North America, Europe and Asia.
Months later, Kepler made its expansion literal. It merged with Countwise in August 2022 and finalised the acquisition in January 2023, folding a US traffic-analytics provider into the business and extending its footprint across the Americas and Europe. Growth by addition, not just iteration.
Where it fits
Retail is often described as being in decline. A more accurate description, and the one Kepler is betting its business on, is that retail is being measured. The stores that survive and grow are increasingly the ones treating a physical location like a website with a door - instrumented, benchmarked and continuously tuned. Kepler Analytics is one of the companies handing brick-and-mortar the dashboards e-commerce always took for granted. Its 2026 win for Best CX Industry Partner at the Retail Awards suggests the market is starting to agree.