retail-analytics
(17)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deren Baker
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
Noam Ben-Zvi
Noam Ben-Zvi is the co-founder and CEO of Placer.ai, the location intelligence platform that turns anonymized phone movement into hard numbers for retailers, landlords, and city planners. He sold his first company, BlueTail, to Salesforce in 2012, then started Placer in 2016. By 2024 the company crossed $100M ARR and raised at a $1.5B valuation.
Shub Bhowmick
Shub Bhowmick is the Co-founder and CEO of Tredence Inc., a data science and AI engineering company he built from a three-bedroom apartment in Bangalore in 2013 into a $350M-revenue powerhouse serving eight of the world's top ten global retailers. A chemical engineer turned management consultant turned founder, Bhowmick spent 17 years in corporate life at Infosys, Mu Sigma, Diamond Consultants, and Liberty Advisor Group before co-founding Tredence with Sumit Mehra and Shashank Dubey. Tredence raised $205M in total funding including a $175M Series B from Advent International in December 2022, employs 4,000+ people, and has a stated goal of reaching $1 billion in revenue by 2030.
John Yang
John Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Treez Inc., the enterprise cannabis retail commerce platform he built from a single dispensary's pain point into a company processing over $4 billion in annual transactions across 600+ retail locations. A Shanghai-born, Reno-raised technologist who grew up troubleshooting computers in his father's shop, Yang applied a decade of Fortune 500 consulting experience to one of America's most underserved retail sectors, raising $76.7M in funding and turning Treez into the backbone of cannabis retail operations in over a dozen states.
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.