retail-operations
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The Startup That Wants to Kill the Spreadsheet Running Your Warehouse
Selling online got easy. The part after the sale - knowing what to buy, when, and how much - is still run on 1950s math and Friday-night spreadsheets. Flieber is betting AI can finally do the boring part.
Jiachun Li Built a Boba Shop Like an Engineer - Then Added a Bunny
She left mechanical engineering for milk tea, turned store operations into a systems problem, and learned that the smallest object in the cup could carry the biggest part of the brand.
The Software Trying to Run the Whole Grocery Store Before the Lettuce Wilts
Grocers lose money in the gap between a forecast and the person standing in aisle seven. Upshop is building the operating layer that turns scattered data into the next useful action - before an empty shelf, missed order or expiring sandwich becomes a write-off.
Webgility Wants Every Ecommerce Order to Tell the Truth
The San Diego software company sits between the cart and the ledger, translating a messy stream of orders, fees, refunds and inventory movements into books an operator can actually use.
Ray Harrison
After three decades in retail, Ray Harrison still begins with the same question: what will make the next stop easier, friendlier and worth repeating? His route from store director to Yesway's senior team explains why the answer lives in both the data and the aisle.
Glimpse
Glimpse is an AI-native platform that automates deduction management for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. Its AI agents log into retailer portals, gather scattered documents, classify and validate deductions against internal data like promotion calendars and supply-chain records, then file disputes and recover cash that brands would otherwise write off. Founded in 2024 by three Purdue classmates after pivoting from an Airbnb product-placement startup, Glimpse works with 200+ brands and retail partners including Suave, Chapstick and Lemon Perfect, and raised a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in March 2026.
YOOBIC
YOOBIC is a frontline employee experience platform that unifies task management, communications, and mobile learning in a single app for retail, hospitality, grocery, and other deskless workforces. Founded in London in 2014 by brothers Fabrice, Avi, and Gilles Haiat, the company helps head offices push consistent store execution while giving frontline teams the tools, training, and information they need to serve customers. YOOBIC has layered generative AI across its platform - including its NEO assistants and Store Manager Copilot - and is used by 350+ enterprise brands and around 2 million users across roughly 80 countries.
Smart Access
Smart Access is an AI platform for frontline operations that closes the gap between how work is supposed to be done and how it actually gets done on the floor. Built for large retail, distribution, and logistics operations, it digitizes standard operating procedures, tracks frontline performance in real time, and turns floor-level observations into mobile coaching and skill-building for workers. Founded in 2015 by Tim Regnier and John White, the company raised a $12M Series A led by Lobby Capital.
Meadow AI
Meadow AI is a Seattle-based multimodal AI platform that gives restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical operations. By combining computer vision, natural language processing, and data from existing point-of-sale, labor, inventory, video, and audio systems, Meadow automates the manual 'secret shopper' audits that chains have long done by hand - continuously evaluating customer experiences and staff performance, then surfacing AI recommendations to lift revenue, tighten consistency, and reduce labor costs. The company emerged from stealth in November 2025 with $6M raised and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
Donny Salazar
Donny Salazar is the founder and CEO of MasonHub, a software-led fulfillment and logistics company he started in 2018 to give fast-scaling beauty, wellness, and fashion brands the kind of order management and warehousing technology he wished he had earlier in his career. Before MasonHub he spent roughly two decades inside high-growth retail operations - COO of sneaker marketplace Flight Club, SVP of Operations at jewelry brand Chloe+Isabel, and a four-year run at Gilt Groupe where his supply-chain team helped scale revenue from $10M to over $500M. A Stanford MBA who once ran marketing at Revlon, Salazar built MasonHub around a headless, API-driven architecture and a bicoastal warehouse footprint, raising seed funding led by Canvas Ventures.
Max Sim
Max Jai Sim is the co-founder and CEO of Meadow AI, a Seattle startup that uses multimodal AI - computer vision, natural language, and operational data - to give restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical locations and to automate the manual 'secret shopper' audits chains still run by hand. A Harvard-trained applied physicist, he previously co-founded the home-closing startup Modus, acquired by Compass in 2020, and earlier worked at T-Mobile and the lunch-delivery startup Peach. Meadow emerged from stealth in late 2025 with $6M raised, including a $4.5M seed round, and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
Jeremy Baker
Jeremy Baker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zipline, the enterprise SaaS platform that connects corporate retail strategy to the frontline store employees executing it. A self-taught developer who skipped university to build a web design company at 16, he previously co-founded MightyHive (acquired by S4 Capital for $150M) and spent five years as a Senior Prototyper at Yahoo. Based in West Vancouver, BC, he built Zipline alongside CEO Melissa Wong to serve over 170,000 retail employees across brands like Gap, LUSH, Sephora, and LEGO.
Melissa Wong
Melissa Wong is the CEO and co-founder of Zipline, the operations platform that fixes the broken communication chain between retail headquarters and store floors. Before building the product, she lived the problem — spending over a decade at Gap and Old Navy trying to get stores to actually execute corporate strategy. She started Zipline in 2014, raised $39.6 million, grew the customer base to 150+ brands including Sephora, American Eagle, and 7-Eleven, and co-authored 'Stores Don't Suck: The 5 Principles of Amazing Retail Execution.' In 2026 she was named to Inc.'s Female Founders 500 and won RetailTech Company CEO of the Year.