retail-analytics
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Thomas McKenna
After years turning retail data into recommendations at dunnhumby, Deloitte and Bain, Thomas McKenna chose the harder brief: build the product, assemble the team and make advanced ecommerce AI useful beyond the largest retailers.
Philip Odelfelt
He walked away from hedge fund money to help old-line manufacturers see what is really happening on the shelf. Now Philip Odelfelt is turning messy retail data into a $27 million bet on the building materials industry.
Intelmatix
Intelmatix is a deep-tech enterprise AI company founded by MIT-trained technologists that builds EDIX, an Enterprise Decision Intelligence Platform designed to act as a 'digital brain' for organizations. Using context-aware AI agents, knowledge graphs and generative AI, EDIX lets companies sense, learn, decide and act across functions like demand forecasting, inventory, workforce planning and site selection - without needing an in-house data science team. Headquartered in Riyadh with offices in London and Boston, Intelmatix focuses on the MENA region, training on local context data that global platforms overlook. It raised a $20M Series A in 2024 - the region's largest AI Series A of its kind - and in 2025 became the first Saudi and MENA AI company named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
Kepler Analytics
Kepler Analytics is a Melbourne-founded retail technology company that helps brick-and-mortar retailers grow store sales through AI-powered foot-traffic sensors and a cloud analytics platform. By measuring how many people pass by, enter, dwell and convert in a store, Kepler turns physical retail into a data-driven operation - benchmarking store performance, guiding staffing and layout, and informing where to open, close or renegotiate leases. The company serves roughly 500 retailers across more than 30,000 locations in 35 countries.
The TJX Companies, Inc.
The TJX Companies, Inc. is the world's largest off-price retailer of apparel and home fashions, operating more than 5,200 stores across nine countries under brands including T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, HomeSense, Sierra, TK Maxx, and Winners. Headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts, TJX buys excess inventory, closeouts, and canceled orders from thousands of vendors and sells brand-name and designer merchandise at prices typically 20% to 60% below full-price retailers, creating a rotating 'treasure hunt' assortment. The Fortune 100 company surpassed $60 billion in annual sales in fiscal 2026.
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.
Brian Tervo
Brian Tervo is the Boston-based Chief Executive Officer of ThirdChannel, a retail execution and merchandising technology company that pairs on-the-ground field teams with real-time software so brands can see and improve how their products show up in physical stores. A longtime operator in the B2B software and retail space, he spent roughly 14 years at supply-chain integration firm TIE Kinetix in senior North American and global roles before leading ThirdChannel. He writes regularly about closing the gap between retail strategy and what actually happens on the store floor.
Daniel Suchi
Daniel Suchi is a New York-based operating executive at Grips Intelligence, an e-commerce market intelligence platform that tracks online sales across marketplaces and brands. He leads operations and finance, having previously built and scaled businesses at Akooda and Yotpo. With an MBA from MIT Sloan and time at Harvard Kennedy School, Suchi works at the intersection of data, revenue operations, and go-to-market strategy, helping retailers, manufacturers, and investors turn digital sales signals into growth decisions.
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.
DataWeave
DataWeave is an AI-powered digital commerce analytics company that helps consumer brands and retailers grow revenue and protect margins online. Its SaaS platform aggregates and analyzes public e-commerce data at massive scale to deliver pricing intelligence, digital shelf analytics, assortment insights, and brand protection to more than 400 global brands and retailers, including Zappos, Costco, and Home Depot.
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.
David Dokes
David Dokes is the co-founder and CEO of Polar Analytics, a first-party data and business intelligence platform built for Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands. Before Polar, he led growth at car-sharing marketplace Turo, where he ran a roughly $20M annual marketing budget. He teamed up with former Airbnb data scientist Charbel Seif in 2020 to give smaller retailers the kind of enterprise-grade data infrastructure that big companies take for granted, unifying scattered marketing, sales, and inventory data into one dashboard that installs in days rather than months. Under his leadership Polar has raised roughly $28.5M and now serves several thousand merchants across dozens of countries.
Polar Analytics
Polar Analytics is a multichannel AI analytics platform for ecommerce and direct-to-consumer brands, built to unify scattered marketing, sales and CRM data into one dashboard on top of a warehouse-native data stack. Founded in 2021 by David Dokes and Charbel Seif, it centralizes 45+ data sources, tracks metrics like CAC, ROAS, MER and LTV, and layers AI agents and a Model Context Protocol connector so merchants can query live data and act on it. Polar serves 4,000+ brands across 45 countries and has raised roughly $28.5M, including an $18M Series A led by Chalfen Ventures in November 2024.
SandStar AI Retail
SandStar AI Retail is a retail-technology company that uses computer vision, deep learning and big-data analytics to power cashierless, autonomous shopping. Founded in 2017 as YI Tunnel and rebranded to SandStar after a 2020 Series B+ round, it builds AI vending machines, pure-vision unmanned stores and smart-store analytics that recognize what shoppers pick up - no RFID tags, barcodes or sensors required - and automatically generate the bill when they walk out. Its systems are deployed across roughly 30 countries and serve dozens of global brands and Fortune 500 operators, including a Coca-Cola Smart Lounge in Beijing.
Style Arcade
Style Arcade is an Australian-founded software company that builds a buying and planning workspace for fashion brands and retailers. Its platform pulls together sales, stock, orders, imagery and web data into one visual source of truth, then uses analytics and AI-driven recommendations to help merchandising teams plan ranges, forecast demand, optimize size curves and reorder inventory. Founded in 2018 by Michaela Wessels and Tristan Hoy, the company serves thousands of teams globally - including Ralph Lauren, David Jones, Princess Polly and Tibi - and positions itself as a faster, more visual alternative to spreadsheets and generic BI tools.
ThirdChannel
ThirdChannel is a Boston-based retail execution company that pairs cloud software with a nationwide network of vetted, on-demand brand representatives. Founded in 2012, it gives consumer brands and retailers real-time visibility into what is actually happening on store shelves - from merchandising compliance and inventory to assisted selling and audits - so decisions at the point of sale are driven by data rather than guesswork.
Wizard
Wizard is an AI-native shopping agent that turns online buying into a single conversation. It interprets natural-language requests, searches across websites, customer reviews, editorial and social content, and returns a tightly curated set of products - usually a top five - then lets shoppers complete the purchase through native checkout without leaving the app. Cofounded by CEO Melissa Bridgeford and chairman Marc Lore, the New York company launched publicly in February 2026, beginning with electronics and a native checkout integration with Best Buy.
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.
Blink Technologies, Inc.
Blink Technologies builds software-only eye-tracking and gaze-estimation technology that runs on the ordinary RGB cameras already in phones, laptops, cars, kiosks and CCTV - no special hardware, headset or dedicated sensor required. Using proprietary deep-learning models, Blink turns any camera-equipped device into a gaze-aware interface for touchless control, ad and retail analytics, driver-attention monitoring, authentication and 3D displays. Founded in 2018 with headquarters in Palo Alto and R&D in Haifa, Israel, the company raised a $14M Series A in 2021, bringing total funding to about $24M.
Michaela Wessels
Michaela Wessels is the CEO and co-founder of Style Arcade, a Sydney-born retail analytics platform that has become the intelligence layer behind fashion brands including The Iconic, Princess Polly, White Fox, Aje, Christopher Esber and Dion Lee. A former merchandise planner at Truworths, Lacoste and The Iconic, she built the product she had wanted while buried under Excel; the company raised an $8M Series A led by Acadian Software in late 2022 and has since expanded to New York and London.
Yili Wu
Yili Wu is the founder and CEO of SandStar (formerly YI Tunnel), a computer-vision company that turns ordinary shops, shelves and vending machines into checkout-free, self-analyzing retail. A first-generation graduate of Tsinghua University's School of Software, he spent roughly eight years selling enterprise software at Oracle and IBM before betting that brick-and-mortar retail could be digitized the way e-commerce already had been. He founded the company in 2016, sold his first big contracts top-down to Fortune 500 headquarters in the US and Europe, and grew SandStar into a business operating across a dozen countries with dual bases in Beijing and Charlotte, North Carolina.
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.
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.
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.
Treez Inc.
Treez is an enterprise cloud commerce platform built for the cannabis retail industry, bundling point of sale (SellTreez), cashless payments (TreezPay), inventory and compliance, retail analytics, ecommerce, and loyalty into a single system. Founded in 2016, the company powers over 600 dispensary locations, processes more than $5 billion in annualized transactions, and is used by an estimated 15% of the U.S. retail cannabis market.
Alloy.ai
Alloy.ai is a San Francisco-based software company that gives consumer goods brands a real-time, end-to-end view of demand and inventory across every retail and e-commerce channel. Its platform automatically ingests and harmonizes point-of-sale, inventory, and ERP data from hundreds of trading partners, then layers analytics, forecasting, and AI agents on top so brands can sense demand shifts, catch stockouts and phantom inventory, and respond in seconds rather than days. Customers like Crayola, BIC, Valvoline, Melissa & Doug, and Anker use it to cut out-of-stocks and protect revenue with their retail partners.
Ariadne
Ariadne is a Munich-based, privacy-first physical-world analytics company that measures how people move through real spaces - shops, malls, train stations and airports - without cameras or facial recognition. Its patented Hybrid Fusion technology pairs anonymous phone-signal sensing with Time-of-Flight depth sensing to deliver up to 99% accurate people counting and sub-meter flow analytics, all GDPR-native and EU AI Act ready. Founded by two Greek engineers who met at the Technical University of Munich, Ariadne has installed more than 1,000 sensors across 800+ locations in 32+ countries, serving customers like San Diego International Airport, IKEA, MediaMarkt and Deutsche Bahn.
FindMine
FindMine is a New York-based AI styling and merchandising automation platform that helps retailers and brands answer one stubborn question for shoppers: how do I wear this? Its 'Complete the Look' and 'Shop the Look' technology builds on-brand, inventory-aware outfits around every product, blending supervised machine learning with generative AI to scale the work of a human stylist across an entire catalog. The result for clients like Lululemon, Gap, Banana Republic and Anine Bing is bigger carts, higher conversion and content that stays on-brand at scale.
Georgios Pipelidis
Georgios Pipelidis is the co-founder and CEO of Ariadne, a Munich-born company that turns the anonymous radio signals leaking from smartphones into privacy-first analytics about how people move through airports, stores and stations - no cameras, no apps, no network connection required. A computer scientist with a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Technical University of Munich, he turned an academic project on indoor positioning - one that beat Google, IBM, Samsung, Cisco and Sony at a 2018 global competition - into a company operating sensors in hundreds of locations worldwide, backed by a $7M Series A.
Joel Beal
Joel Beal is the CEO and co-founder of Alloy.ai, a demand and inventory control tower that helps consumer goods brands like Bic, Bosch, Crayola and Ferrero turn messy retailer data into daily, SKU-store-level decisions. A would-be economics academic who walked away from a Stanford PhD because it felt too theoretical, Beal built a career in applied data science at Applied Predictive Technologies and helped scale fintech Addepar from pre-revenue to $300B in assets before founding Alloy in 2016. The idea came from his sister, who spent her weeks manually stitching together retailer spreadsheets for a luxury shoe brand.