Omnistream

Most shoppers never notice the planogram - the shelf-layout diagram that decides which products sit at eye level and which get buried near the floor. For a century, retailers drew it by hand and rolled a single template out to thousands of stores. Omnistream thinks that averaging is quietly expensive.

Founded in Singapore in 2018 and now headquartered in Sydney, Omnistream builds AI-powered, consumer-centric planograms - unique shelf plans generated store by store from a retailer's own sales and product data. Its founder and CEO, Wendy Chen, spent years running algorithmically driven trading desks in New York and Hong Kong before turning the same quantitative playbook on convenience stores and supermarkets. Where finance had replaced gut-feel with data, she argued, retail category management was still largely manual and averaged.

The pitch is unglamorous and specific: right product, right store, right place, right price. Omnistream's software integrates with a retailer's existing systems, ingests the data, and generates store-level planograms in minutes - then simulates countless alternative scenarios before a single product is moved. Today it is deployed across more than 8,500 retail locations spanning Asia, Australia, Europe and North America.

Before Omnistream, Wendy Chen worked at an algorithmically driven market maker on Wall Street from 2007 to 2012 - joining as quant trading infrastructure hit its inflection point - and later ran automated commodities desks reporting annual profits north of US$100M. She then turned to angel investing across Canada and Silicon Valley, and an early bet on Instacart put her face-to-face with the messiness of grocery operations.

That exposure became a thesis: a century-old, fragmented industry that touches every person on earth was still planning by human intuition and averages - the same inefficiency algorithmic trading had already dismantled in finance. She launched Omnistream from Singapore specifically to reach early-adopter retailers in Asia before expanding west.

Category management and space planning have long been dominated by heavyweight suites - Blue Yonder (formerly JDA), Nielsen's Spaceman, Symphony RetailAI, Relex and Oracle Retail - and, inside many retailers, by spreadsheets and CAD-drawn planograms. These tools are powerful but often slow, expensive and template-driven.

Omnistream positions itself as the simpler, faster, more affordable alternative: cloud-native, quick to deploy, and built to generate a distinct plan for every store rather than a regional master. Its edge is less any single feature than a philosophy imported from quantitative finance - simulate widely, optimize for the P&L, and let the data, not the template, decide the shelf.