retail-ai
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Prashant Agrawal and the Ten Billion Decisions Hiding in a Spreadsheet
A consultant, columnist and Columbia professor built Impact Analytics around a quiet retail rebellion: let machines calculate the permutations, so people can make the consequential calls.
Angam Parashar Kept the Team and Changed the Question
ParallelDots began by organizing news, stopped, regrouped and found its future on the supermarket shelf. Through every pivot, its CEO kept one conviction intact: the team matters more than the first idea.
Rahul Chabukswar Left Microsoft to Fix the Grocery Aisle’s Messiest Problem
He began with a warehouse, learned why supermarket data lies, and built Homesome around a stubborn idea: the neighborhood grocer should own the digital relationship too.
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.
Sampo Parkkinen Is Teaching Beauty Tech to Be More Helpful
The Revieve founder has spent two decades studying how people choose - first in physical stores, now through AI. His useful heresy is simple: stop selling so hard and start helping people buy.
Angie Westbrock Learned to Read the Factory Floor. Now She’s Teaching Stores to Speak.
The Standard AI CEO built her career by listening to the people closest to the work. Her latest assignment is a company pivot that turns ceiling cameras into a new source of retail intelligence.
Rohan Deuskar
Rohan Deuskar is the co-founder and CEO of Stylitics, a New York-based visual merchandising and outfitting platform that dresses catalogs for retailers like Macy's, Walmart, Kohl's, Puma and Revolve. Launched in 2011 out of Wharton, Stylitics started as a consumer closet app, pivoted to B2B AI-powered outfit bundling, and raised roughly $105 million in total funding, with an $80 million Series C from PSG in 2022.
Mark Chrystal
Dr. Mark Chrystal is the CEO and co-founder of Profitmind, a Pittsburgh-based agentic AI startup that gives retailers a team of AI analysts for pricing, inventory, assortment, forecasting and competitive intelligence. A 25-year retail operator who ran analytics, supply chain and e-commerce at rue21, David's Bridal, American Eagle, Disney Store and Victoria's Secret, he was recruited by AI pioneer Andrew Ng to build software 'for retailers by retailers.' The company, formerly known as Netail, has raised roughly $14 million to date, including a $9 million Series A backed by Accenture Ventures, with partnerships spanning Accenture and Microsoft.
Guru Hariharan
Guru Hariharan is the Founder and CEO of CommerceIQ, a unicorn-valued AI platform that helps 2,200+ consumer brands - from Nestle to Kellogg's - automate and optimize their retail ecommerce operations across Amazon, Walmart, and other major retailers. A veteran of Amazon and eBay, he co-invented the Amazon Selling Coach, sold his first company Boomerang Commerce's analytics unit to Lowe's in 2019, and pivoted to build CommerceIQ into a $136.6M ARR business by 2024. In May 2025, he launched AllyAI, a suite of agentic AI teammates purpose-built for retail - a product he describes as pioneering the next era of algorithmic commerce.
Kevin Johnson
Kevin H. Johnson is the CEO of Focal Systems, an AI-powered retail operations company deploying shelf-scanning cameras across brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. A 30-year veteran of building and scaling tech businesses, he grew Ebates forty-fold before selling it to Rakuten for $1 billion, then led Udemy as a publicly-traded company, and now applies that commercial track record to the frontier problem of putting real-time AI intelligence into every grocery aisle.
Purva Gupta
Purva Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Lily AI, the Mountain View-based AI platform that bridges the gap between how retailers describe products and how consumers actually search for them. Founded in 2015 after her own frustrating experience shopping online as a newly arrived immigrant from India, Gupta built Lily AI into an enterprise-grade solution serving major retailers including Macy's, Bloomingdale's, J.Crew, and thredUP. The company has raised $62 million in total funding, achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth, and is recognized as a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company. A Tory Burch Fellow, Ad Age Leading Women honoree, EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, and venture partner at Unshackled Ventures, Gupta has become a prominent voice in retail AI and immigrant entrepreneurship.
Matt Schwartz
Matt Schwartz is the CEO and co-founder of Afresh, a San Francisco-based AI company building the operating system for fresh food in grocery retail. A Stanford MBA alumnus with a lifelong obsession with food systems, he co-founded Afresh in 2017 after discovering that billion-dollar grocery chains were still managing produce orders with paper and pen. Under his leadership, Afresh has raised $181.8M in total funding, deployed across 12,500+ departments in 40 states, and prevented more than 200 million pounds of food waste - serving major chains including Albertsons, Meijer, and Wakefern.
Prem Kiran
Prem Kiran is the Founder and CEO of Hypersonix Inc., an agentic AI platform that helps retail and commerce businesses maximize profit through autonomous pricing, forecasting, and promotion optimization. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in enterprise technology, Kiran previously served as Global VP at SAP, founded and exited CLYP Technology, and held C-suite roles at Fishbowl before building Hypersonix into a $200M-valued company backed by B Capital, Intel Capital, and investor Gokul Rajaram. His ProfitGPT platform now makes over 100,000 autonomous daily pricing decisions across 5M+ SKUs for 100+ retail brands.