digital-shelf
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Vizit asks the question your product photos cannot answer: will it sell?
A chocolate brand moved its pictures around and reported more sales. Vizit’s wager is that the next useful thing AI does for commerce is teach companies which images deserve to be seen.
The Picture That Was Missing
Nfinite made a business out of putting products into pictures. Its more interesting move is finding the picture a retailer forgot to make.
Rob Gonzalez Spent 14 Years Making the Digital Shelf Legible
A PalmPilot prototype disappeared in a restaurant fire. The larger idea survived: make commerce systems speak clearly to one another, then keep building until an industry learns the language.
The $452.6 Million Bet on Making Product Data Behave
Every retailer wants the same toothpaste described differently. Salsify built a large enterprise software business by turning that maddening fact into a system - and now it wants to teach shopping agents what every product actually is.
Syndigo Built a $3.5 Billion Product-Data Machine - Now It Wants to Decide What Shoppers Trust
Syndigo spent years making sure the right ingredient list, drill-bit dimension, and product image reached the right shelf. After combining with 1WorldSync and buying Taggstar, it is reaching for a bigger prize: the layer of commerce that both people and AI agents use to decide what to buy.
Harshal Nimawat Is Learning to Steer Where Retail Meets AI
From Mastercard and Wharton to CommerceIQ, Harshal Nimawat has built a career around the places where technology, capital and operating judgment collide. His route into the CEO's office includes one unusually literal lesson in keeping a crew on course.
The 'Where to Buy' Button Grew Up and Learned to Talk to Robots
PriceSpider spent 20 years turning a little 'Where to Buy' button into a business. Now, rebranded as Wayvia, it is wagering that the next shopper won't be a person at all - it will be an AI agent doing the buying.
The Company That Turned the Checkout Line Into a Media Channel
Mars United Commerce spent 50 years learning how people actually shop. In 2024, Publicis paid a reported $600 million to own that knowledge.
Spreetail Wants to Make the Internet’s Awkward Boxes Arrive on Time
The Nebraska ecommerce operator buys the inventory, tunes the listings and ships the awkward stuff. Its pitch to brands is simple: one partner, shared risk and fewer places for a marketplace problem to hide.
Etaily
Etaily is a Southeast Asian commerce enablement platform that helps global and regional consumer brands sell online across the region. Founded in 2020 by Alexander Friedhoff, it runs an end-to-end operation - marketplace and D2C store management, social commerce and livestreaming, digital marketing, data analytics, warehousing and fulfillment - so brands can launch and scale on channels like Lazada, Shopee, TikTok Shop, Zalora and brand.com without building local teams. Headquartered in the Philippines with offices in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, Etaily has processed over 40 million orders and works with brands including Levi's, Skechers, Abbott and L'Oreal.
Grips Intelligence
Grips Intelligence is an e-commerce market research platform that measures daily online and offline product sales, giving brands, retailers, and investors a competitor- and SKU-level map of digital commerce. Founded in Berlin in 2018 by Moritz Thoma and Daniel Schmeh, Grips turns transaction signals into estimates of revenue, units sold, pricing, conversion, and market share so customers can spot growth opportunities and blind spots across marketplaces and direct-to-consumer stores.
Karthik Bettadapura
Karthik Bettadapura is the co-founder and CEO of DataWeave, an AI-powered SaaS platform that delivers competitive intelligence to retailers and consumer brands. Founded in 2011 in Bengaluru with co-founder Vikranth Ramanolla, DataWeave aggregates and analyzes billions of unstructured data points across the web - tracking prices, assortment, and digital-shelf performance for enterprise clients. Karthik leads product vision and business development, and drove the company's pivot from India to the US market. An IIIT-Bangalore engineer who earlier helped build CNBC's Web18, he now runs DataWeave from the Austin, Texas area.
David Feinleib
David Feinleib is a serial entrepreneur, former venture capitalist, and author who is now Founder and CEO of It'sRapid.ai, a Palo Alto AI platform that turns product data and existing assets into finished commerce content for major brands. He has founded multiple companies acquired by EMC, HP, and Keynote Systems, sold Content Analytics to Syndigo in 2019, invested as a General Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and written four books including 'Why Startups Fail' and 'Big Data Bootcamp.'
Flywheel
Flywheel is a Baltimore-born digital commerce company that helps brands grow on Amazon, Walmart, Instacart and 400-plus other online marketplaces. Born in 2014 as one of the first specialists in the messy mechanics of selling through Amazon, it pairs cloud software (the Flywheel Commerce Cloud) with managed services across retail media, retail operations and market intelligence. After being bought by Ascential and then by Omnicom for roughly $835 million in 2024, Flywheel now serves more than 4,500 brands - including over half of 2022's top 100 publicly listed CPG companies - with about 2,600 colleagues across the Americas, Europe, APAC and China.
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.
Andy Ballard
Andy Ballard is the CEO and co-founder of Wiser Solutions, Inc., the San Mateo-based omnichannel retail intelligence platform he built through the 2017 merger of Quad Analytix and Mobee. A Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA, Ballard spent nearly a decade at Hellman & Friedman where he sat on the boards of DoubleClick, Getty Images, Internet Brands, and Catalina Marketing before launching Quad Analytix in 2012. Today he leads a 510-person company that tracks billions of online and in-store data points for over 750 global brands and retailers, while also serving on the boards of Domino's Pizza and Etsy, and running Figtree Partners, his software-focused investment firm.
CommerceIQ
CommerceIQ is a Mountain View-based AI platform that helps the world's largest consumer brands - Nestle, Colgate, Whirlpool, Kellogg's, Bayer - grow profitably on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart and 450+ other retailers by automating retail media, digital shelf, supply chain and sales operations with AI agents.