merchandising
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The Company Behind the Shelf Is Building Retail's Operating System
Most shoppers never see Acosta Group. They see the shelf it reset, the sample it served, the product page it repaired and the promotion its data helped price.
The Finnish Engine Trying to Make Every Online Store Feel Like It Remembers You
Founded in 2013 by three Finns tired of impersonal online shopping, Nosto now decides what millions of shoppers see the moment a page loads - and it is betting its next chapter on AI agents that run the store for you.
Constructor
Constructor is an AI-powered product discovery and search platform for enterprise ecommerce. Its clickstream-trained models run search, browse, recommendations, autosuggest, quizzes, and agentic shopping experiences for retailers like Sephora, Petco, Under Armour, Birkenstock, and The Very Group - tying every result back to KPIs like revenue per visitor.
Belk
Belk is a privately held American department store chain founded in 1888 by William Henry Belk in Monroe, North Carolina. Headquartered in Charlotte, it operates roughly 290 stores across about 16 Southeastern states plus belk.com, selling mid-priced national and private-label apparel, shoes, cosmetics, jewelry, accessories and home goods. Marketed under the tagline 'Modern. Southern. Style.,' Belk blends a 130-plus-year Southern retail heritage with an omnichannel model and a portfolio of exclusive private brands.
Toolio
Toolio is a New York-based retail technology company that builds cloud-based, AI-powered merchandising software. Its platform replaces spreadsheet-driven planning with connected workflows for merchandise financial planning, open-to-buy, assortment planning, demand forecasting, and allocation. Founded in 2019 by ex-Walmart engineers Eytan Daniyalzade and Berk Atikoglu, Toolio helps modern retailers and direct-to-consumer brands decide what to buy, how much, and where to place it - managing over a billion dollars of inventory across more than 100 retail customers.
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.
MakerSights
MakerSights is a San Francisco software company that gives consumer brands a Voice-of-Consumer platform for testing product ideas before they are made. Founded in 2015, it lets apparel, footwear and accessories teams put concepts, line plans and assortments in front of thousands of real target shoppers in hours, helping them make fewer wrong bets and cut down on overproduction. Its newer MakerLabs offering uses AI-trained digital twins to deliver synthetic consumer readouts in under an hour. Brands including New Balance, Madewell, Champion, Ralph Lauren and Hoka use it to align what gets made with what people actually buy.
Profitmind
Profitmind (operated by Netail, Inc.) is a Pittsburgh-based retail decision-intelligence company that builds agentic AI to help merchandising teams make faster, more profitable pricing, assortment, inventory, promotion, and marketing decisions. Founded by retail veteran Dr. Mark Chrystal and incubated inside Andrew Ng's AI Fund/Landing AI ecosystem, its platform unifies a retailer's strategy, internal data, and external competitive signals into prioritized, explainable recommendations - serving retailers from $20M to $100B in revenue across three continents.
Lily AI
Lily AI is a Mountain View-based retail AI company that translates the language of the customer into the language of the catalog. Its platform uses computer vision, NLP and large language models to enrich product data with thousands of consumer-centric attributes - powering site search, recommendations, SEO/SEM and demand forecasting for retailers like Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Gap and thredUP.