category-management
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Imperial Trading
For more than a century, a New Orleans wholesaler has quietly kept America's corner stores stocked. Now Imperial Trading is betting that the future of the convenience store isn't the shelf - it's the kitchen.
Ray Harrison
After three decades in retail, Ray Harrison still begins with the same question: what will make the next stop easier, friendlier and worth repeating? His route from store director to Yesway's senior team explains why the answer lives in both the data and the aisle.
Omnistream
Omnistream is an AI-powered category-management platform that helps retailers build consumer-centric, store-level planograms in minutes. Founded in 2018 by former quant trader Wendy Chen, the company integrates a retailer's sales and product data to generate assortment and shelf-space recommendations tuned to each store's local demand. Its software is deployed across 8,500+ retail locations in convenience, grocery and health & beauty, serving names like 7-Eleven, Watsons and FairPrice, and reports incremental sales gains of roughly 4-11% alongside sharp reductions in waste.
Datavations
Datavations is a New York-based, AI-powered market intelligence platform built exclusively for manufacturers and distributors in the building materials and home improvement industries. It aggregates granular, store-level and SKU-level retail data across thousands of stores to give suppliers the cross-retailer visibility they otherwise lack - helping them optimize pricing, inventory, and product assortment, and walk into merchant meetings armed with data their retail partners don't have. Founded in 2020 by Philip Odelfelt, the company raised a $17M Series A in July 2025 led by Forestay Capital.
Hetal Retail
Hetal Retail is a New York-based startup that helps consumer brands see what is actually happening on store shelves. A crowdsourced network of everyday shoppers - called Hetalites - films short videos of store aisles on a mobile app, and Hetal's computer vision and AI turn that footage into planogram-compliance diagnostics, prioritized issue lists with visual proof, and correlations between shelf execution and sales. The pitch: retail-level visibility for a fraction of the cost of traditional manual audits, and a system that helps coordinate the fix rather than just flagging the problem.
Bedrock Analytics
Bedrock Analytics is an Oakland-based B2B SaaS company that turns the messy syndicated sales data CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands buy from sources like NielsenIQ and Circana into clear, automated selling stories. Built 'by CPG people for CPG people,' its cloud platform harmonizes retail data and uses a multi-model AI stack (ChatGPT, Claude, Llama) to generate visualizations, insights, and AI-driven sales decks - helping brand sales teams win shelf space and category reviews. The company tracks more than $100 billion in CPG sales across 80+ categories every month.
Wiser Solutions, Inc.
Wiser Solutions is a San Mateo-based retail intelligence company that gives brands and retailers real-time data and insights to win at the moment a shopper decides to buy. Its SaaS platform spans price intelligence, MAP monitoring, market intelligence, and in-store retail execution - tracking more than 10 billion products, 150,000 sellers, and 600,000 stores across 45+ countries. Trusted by 700+ global brands and retailers including Amazon, Ferrero, Beko, and Best Buy.
Will Salcido
Will Salcido is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bedrock Analytics, an AI-powered CPG data analytics platform that transforms syndicated and retailer data into compelling sales stories for consumer goods manufacturers. A Cornell-trained economist who cut his teeth at Nestlé, Novartis, Ghirardelli, and Lindt & Sprüngli across 12 countries, Salcido bet half his 401(k) on the idea that data storytelling - not raw dashboards - was the missing link between CPG brands and retail shelf space. Today, Bedrock tracks over $100 billion in CPG sales monthly, serves clients across 350+ product categories, and runs a multi-model AI stack using ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama to automate insight generation at scale.