retail-tech
(66)
Sidec: from online shops to silicon chips
Selangor’s digital economy company began by helping merchants sell online. Its next wager is harder: give Malaysian businesses the people, tools and connections to design what the world buys.
Condor Connect puts startups on the supermarket floor
A Curitiba accelerator turns a supermarket group into a testing ground for young companies. Its most useful offer may be the chance to win a paying customer.
The Corner Shop Became the Checkout
Yalo put ordering inside WhatsApp for millions of small retailers. The clever part is less the chat window than the machinery behind it: stock, pricing, suggestions and a route to a real order.
The Loyalty Program That Had to Learn Accounting
Gameball sells points, tiers and little moments of delight. Its more revealing work is less theatrical: joining scattered customer records, making rewards redeemable everywhere, and keeping the cost of generosity visible.
The Line That Learned to Disappear
Waitwhile did not abolish the queue. It did something more useful: it uncoupled your place in line from your feet - then rebuilt the machinery when success made the first version creak.
The Fingerprint That Cost $340 Million
Pay By Touch made the wallet optional years before the smartphone did. Its $50 fingerprint reader worked; the harder problem was persuading enough people - and keeping a sprawling company alive long enough for habit to catch up.
The Six-Minute Bet Behind navNote’s Retail AI
A young retail software company is betting that the smartest place for store AI is not always the cloud. Its argument begins with a shelf photo, eight microservices, and one stubborn question: does this help the person on the floor?
Chalhoub Greenhouse Gives Startups a Way Into the Store
The luxury retailer’s venture builder pairs founders with grants, working retail channels and people who can say yes. Its real test comes when the pilot ends.
ClearCourse Bought the Software Behind Britain’s Small Businesses - Then Put Payments Inside It
The quiet systems running a marina, a garage or a golf club are hard to replace and easy to overlook. ClearCourse has spent eight years buying those niche operators, joining their workflows to payments, and betting that useful beats fashionable.
Abhishek Bhayana Built for the Checkout Counter, Not the Pitch Deck
Bikry’s founder spent a decade circling one stubborn problem: how to give a neighbourhood business the powers of an internet company without charging it like one.
Sandra Lifshits Is Teaching AI to Hunt for Vintage
After weekends in vintage markets and shifts inside New York shops, the product leader saw the real problem: secondhand shopping had plenty of inventory and precious little editing.
Mad Mobile Put the Cash Register on a Phone. Now It Wants to Rewrite the Store Around It.
The Tampa company spent 15 years making old commerce systems mobile. A pandemic-era POS acquisition, $70 million in financing, and a new bet on agentic AI have turned that integration trick into a much bigger ambition.
Coolmate Made Men’s Shopping Boring - Then Built a Growth Machine
The Hanoi startup removed the browsing, bargaining and return anxiety from buying basics. Now it is testing whether a frictionless menswear formula can travel across categories, storefronts and borders.
The Shop Behind the Shops: PriyoShop Is Rewiring Bangladesh’s Corner Stores
Bangladesh’s neighborhood stores move most of the country’s commerce, yet many still restock through slow, cash-heavy supply chains. PriyoShop is building the ordering, delivery, data and credit rails beneath their shelves.
Bazaarvoice Built the Plumbing Beneath the Five-Star Economy
Every star rating looks tiny. Bazaarvoice turned billions of them into retail infrastructure - then began teaching that infrastructure to speak to creators, social platforms, and AI shopping agents.
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.
Ocula
Retailers spent years teaching product pages to rank for humans. Ocula is betting the next customer may be an algorithm - and rebuilding the catalogue for both.
Ocula Technologies
The Belfast company builds AI agents that rewrite millions of product listings so retailers surface in Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity alike. Backed by Castelnau and Lloyds, it is betting the next shopper won't be human.
B-Stock
B-Stock turned retail's awkward back room - returns, trade-ins and excess goods - into a data-rich B2B market. Its real product is not the pallet. It is a faster, more legible second life for inventory.
Bonat
The Riyadh startup that turns a coffee-shop punch card into a data engine - and just raised $6 million to teach every merchant in the Gulf how to keep a customer.
Retrofit
Retrofit is an AI-curated vintage marketplace that uses AI agents to sift through hundreds of thousands of secondhand listings, analyzing social media trends, sales data and personal style to surface pieces matched to a shopper's taste, size and budget. Founded in 2024 by Sandra Lifshits and Maddy Yip and backed by Y Combinator (W25), it standardizes photography and descriptions from partner vintage stores so shoppers get a clean, personalized feed instead of endless digging.
Yuma AI
Yuma AI is an AI customer service platform for ecommerce brands, using autonomous AI agents to resolve support, sales, social, and chat conversations end to end. Built for large Shopify merchants and plugged into helpdesks like Gorgias, Zendesk, and Kustomer, Yuma automates the bulk of repetitive tickets - order status, returns, refunds, subscriptions - while keeping brand voice and guardrails intact. Founded in late 2022 by three-time YC founder Guillaume Luccisano, the company went through Y Combinator's W23 batch and raised a $5M seed round.
GudangAda
GudangAda is an Indonesian B2B e-commerce marketplace founded in 2019 that connects manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and retail stores across the country's fragmented fast-moving-consumer-goods supply chain. Alongside its marketplace it offers logistics, merchant tools and financing so small retailers can source, order, pay and receive goods in one app. After scaling to roughly half a million SMEs and about $6 billion in transaction value on more than $135 million of venture funding, the company retrenched from its capital-intensive FMCG model and pivoted toward beauty and personal-care retail under its Kaka Beauty brand.
Rewaa
Rewaa is a Riyadh-based retail technology company that builds a cloud-based operating platform for small and medium retailers, unifying point-of-sale, inventory management, accounting and ZATCA-compliant e-invoicing in a single dashboard. Founded in 2018, it synchronizes physical stores and online sales channels in real time and has grown to serve more than 23,000 active merchants across Saudi Arabia and the wider region. Rewaa raised the largest Series A for a SaaS company in MENA ($27M in 2023) and followed with a $45M Series B in late 2025 to expand its AI-driven automation tools.
Tiliter
Tiliter is a Sydney-based computer-vision company that turns ordinary camera images into structured operational data. It began by solving product recognition at retail scale - identifying fresh produce and unbarcoded goods at self-checkout with high accuracy and no stickers - and has since expanded into a broader platform of AI 'Vision Agents' for verification, inspection, counting, damage detection, OCR and cleanliness auditing across retail, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and industrial operations.
Esper
Esper is a Bellevue, Washington software company that builds an enterprise-scale device management platform for dedicated edge hardware - the point-of-sale systems, kiosks, tablets, rugged handhelds, and digital signage that run modern retail, restaurants, healthcare, and logistics. Founded in 2018 by former Microsoft and Amazon engineers, Esper pitched itself early as 'DevOps for devices,' bringing pipelines, remote control, custom Android builds, and over-the-air updates to fleets that traditional mobile device management tools struggle to handle. The company has raised roughly $100M+ across Series A through C and manages devices for customers including Taco Bell, DoorDash, Intelity, and Spire Health.
Eytan Daniyalzade
Eytan Daniyalzade is the co-founder and CEO of Toolio, a New York-based cloud platform that helps retailers plan, forecast, and allocate inventory using AI instead of spreadsheets. A Stanford-trained engineer, he built and sold the store-search app Stylr to Walmart in 2014, then spent five years leading omni-channel and digital initiatives at Walmart eCommerce - work that included Sam's Club Scan & Go and Walmart Pay - before leaving in 2019 to launch Toolio with longtime partner Berk Atikoglu. Toolio now serves more than 100 retailers, has managed over $1 billion in inventory, and raised an $8M Series A led by Jump Capital.
Olga Dogadkina
Olga Dogadkina is the co-founder and CEO of Emperia, a London-based immersive commerce platform that builds virtual stores and 3D brand experiences for the world's biggest luxury and retail names, including Dior, Burberry, Bloomingdale's, Tommy Hilfiger, Harrods, Lacoste, Christie's and Dom Pérignon. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Retail & Ecommerce list in 2025, she started Emperia in 2018 after trying VR for the first time on a Microsoft fashion project and deciding it would change the way people shop.
Patrick Smith
Patrick Smith is a Boston-based software executive currently serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Onebeat, a retail inventory intelligence platform. A Providence College graduate with roots in enterprise supply-chain software, he has spent his career at the intersection of merchandising strategy and inventory optimization, with prior stops at ToolsGroup, antuit.ai, ESG, and Park City Group. He writes and speaks about the 'Retail Margin Spiral' and the 'Inventory Intelligence Loop,' arguing that softlines retailers must move from reactive planning to continuous, real-time decisioning.
Raz Golan
Raz Golan is the CEO and co-founder of Shopic, a Tel Aviv-based retail technology company that makes a clip-on device that snaps onto standard grocery carts and turns them into AI-powered smart carts. A veteran of Israel's Unit 8200 and a former Check Point security researcher, Golan started Shopic in 2015 with Eran Kravitz and Dan Bendler after concluding that big supermarkets did not need a new cart - they needed a small computer that could ride along on the one they already owned.