retail-tech
(31)
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.
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.
Dan Leahy
Dan Leahy is the co-founder and CEO of MakerSights, a San Francisco consumer-insights platform that helps apparel, footwear, and accessories brands decide what to make before they make it. His pitch is blunt: the fashion industry still builds product the way it did in the 1980s, guessing at what shoppers want and burning through unsold inventory in the process. MakerSights collects consumer feedback at scale and ties it to real sales data so brands like Ralph Lauren, New Balance, Everlane, and Madewell can produce less waste and more of what people actually buy. Before MakerSights, Leahy founded Savored, a restaurant yield-management startup acquired by Groupon, and cut his teeth in finance at Silver Lake and Brown Brothers Harriman. A Maine kid who once mailed handwritten letters to NBA stars begging for autographs, he built a career on the same stubborn premise: ask enough people for what you want, and enough of them say yes.
Jen Rhi
Jen Rhi is the founder and CEO of NXN Labs, a San Francisco and Seoul based AI company building an operating system for fashion and commerce imagery. A Stanford computer science graduate and former McKinsey and SoftBank Ventures alum, she left the investor side of the table to attack a problem she kept seeing in brands: creative ideas were cheap, but the production bandwidth to shoot models, garments and campaigns at scale was the real bottleneck. NXN Labs answers that with proprietary multimodal diffusion models that generate photorealistic on-model imagery, video and virtual try-ons without a physical shoot. Two months after founding, the company was backed by Naver D2SF, KB Investment and Smilegate; by 2026 it had landed European luxury clients and a spot on the NRF Innovators' Showcase Top 50.
David Roger
David Roger is the cofounder and CEO of Hetal Retail, a New York-based startup that uses computer vision and a crowd of everyday shoppers to tell brands what is really happening on store shelves. Before Hetal, he co-founded and ran Felix Gray, the company that pushed blue light glasses into the mainstream and onto the shelves of Target, CVS and Best Buy before selling in 2023. A self-described generalist who lives at the intersection of analytical and creative, Roger turned the frustrations he felt as a brand operator - expensive, slow, unusable retail data - into the company he runs today.
Grant Sohn
Grant Sohn is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spoqa, the Seoul-based company behind Dodo Point, Korea's #1 offline rewards service, which grew past 20 million users and 10,000+ merchant partners. A Stanford economics graduate and former McKinsey analyst, he left consulting in the United States to build loyalty software for brick-and-mortar shops in South Korea. In 2018 he co-founded Carry Protocol, a blockchain venture aiming to give shoppers control of their own transaction data, and after selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, he refocused Spoqa on restaurants with Kitchenboard.
Andrew Duffy
Andrew Duffy is the co-founder and CEO of SparkPlug, a San Francisco software company that pays frontline retail and restaurant workers cash bonuses for the sales they actually drive. A behavioral-science nerd from Harvard who put in time at Bridgewater Associates and built a luxury whole-leaf tea brand before this, Duffy turned a teenage hot streak selling margaritas into a venture-backed platform that has routed millions of dollars in supplemental income to hourly employees and raised $11.5 million to keep going.
Li Chen
Li Haslett Chen is the founder and CEO of Howl, a New York creator-commerce platform that has driven more than $1.1 billion in creator-led sales and paid over $100 million to roughly 23,000 creators since 2022. A former biochemical engineer, Vogue intern, McKinsey analyst, and Moda Operandi marketer, she previously founded the editorial-commerce company Narrativ. She has been named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a Financial Times retail disruptor, and an Ad Age 40-Under-40, and served on the board of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Nels Stromborg
Nels Stromborg is a VP Transformational Leader for Media and Entertainment at Adobe, based in Chicago, with 20+ years of digital media sales experience. Known for scaling sales organizations and consistently outperforming targets - hitting 300% of goal in FY2020 and winning Adobe's North American and Media & Entertainment Seller of the Year award - he has built a career arc from floor trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange to driving Adobe's most strategic entertainment partnerships. He has held senior sales leadership roles at Undertone, Retale, and AOL before joining Adobe.
Ranga Mohan
Ranga Mohan is a technology executive with roughly two decades of experience building digital platforms at the intersection of engineering and go-to-market strategy. Currently VP of Digital Technology (GTM-Marketing) at ServiceNow, he joined the Santa Clara-based enterprise cloud leader in 2025 after five years as VP of Digital Technology & International at 7-Eleven, where he led the construction of a global convenience tech platform. Earlier stints at Capital One - where he helped create the industry's first online-only mortgage pre-approval experience - and Bank of America shaped his deep fluency in scaling digital customer experiences inside large, complex organizations.
Amit Sharma
Amit Sharma founded Narvar in 2013 to fix the most overlooked moment in e-commerce: the anxious gap between clicking 'buy' and the package arriving at the door. Drawing on years spent optimizing supply chains at Williams-Sonoma, Walmart, and Apple, he built a post-purchase experience platform from a bootstrapped garage operation into a market leader serving 650+ retailers - including Sephora, Home Depot, LVMH, and Patagonia - before stepping back from the CEO role in October 2024 to an advisory position.
Anisa Kumar
Anisa Kumar is the CEO of Narvar, a retail technology platform serving 1,500+ global brands with AI-powered post-purchase experiences. With over 23 years across Target, Walmart.com, and Levi Strauss where she helped lead the company's IPO, she became Narvar's Chief Customer Officer in 2021 and was elevated to CEO in October 2024. Under her leadership, Narvar launched its IRIS AI engine - analyzing 42-74 billion consumer interactions annually - to transform the moment after checkout from a cost center into a growth engine.
Kathleen Schnering
Kathleen Schnering is the Chief Executive Officer of Clover Network, one of the largest cloud-based point-of-sale platforms in the United States. Under the Fiserv umbrella, Clover serves more than 800,000 merchants across retail, restaurant, and services verticals, processing hundreds of billions in payments annually. Schnering leads a platform generating over $2.7 billion in annual revenue with a workforce of approximately 1,500 employees, steering Clover's expansion into international markets and value-added services as it targets $4.5 billion in revenue by 2026.
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.
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.
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.
Tanner Johnson
Tanner Johnson is the Co-Founder and Former President of Curated, a San Francisco-based expert marketplace that matches shoppers with passionate product specialists for high-consideration purchases like outdoor gear, skiing equipment, golf clubs, and jewelry. A Princeton-educated psychology and neuroscience graduate with roots in outdoor education, Johnson helped build Curated from a 2017 founding concept into a $141.5M-funded platform with over 250 employees - until its $330 million stock acquisition by social commerce company Flip in July 2024.
Rexhep Dollaku
Rexhep 'Rexhi' Dollaku is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that has become the first Black-led VC to cross $1 billion in assets under management. Born in Ulcinj on the Montenegro-Albania border and raised in Pittsburgh, Dollaku studied economics, global health, and health policy at Harvard before building his career in venture. He joined Base10 as an early team member, architecting the firm's thematic research methodology that now drives 90% of its investments and growing it from a seed-stage firm to a $1.3B AUM powerhouse. His focus: backing founders who automate the 'real economy' - food, logistics, retail, fintech - solving problems for the 99% while donating half of the firm's profits to HBCU scholarships.
Selene Casabal
Selene Casabal is the Managing General Partner and Chief Venture Officer at Fuel Venture Capital, a Miami-based firm managing approximately $550 million across five funds. A former Silicon Valley founder whose retail tech startup was acquired by b8ta, she became an AI super angel with investments in Perplexity, Replit, Impulse Space, and Serve Robotics before joining Fuel VC in October 2025 to lead its $100M+ AI-focused deployment strategy. A Sequoia Capital Scout and South Park Commons fellow, she is on a mission to rewrite the gender imbalance in artificial intelligence one investment at a time.
Skyler Fernandes
J. Skyler (Sky) Fernandes is the Founder and General Partner of VU Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund spanning San Francisco, Hong Kong, Munich, and São Paulo, and the Co-Founder & CEO of Venture University, widely considered the world's leading investor accelerator. A Powerlist 100 VC, Fernandes has assembled a portfolio of 150+ investments including early positions in SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta (Facebook), Uber, Palantir, and Neuralink - with 25+ unicorns and 20+ multi-billion dollar exits. Before VU, he founded Simon Venture Group, the VC arm of Simon Property Group (S&P 100), which CB Insights ranked a top 5 retail investor alongside GV, Intel Capital, and Comcast Ventures. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and studied Physics and Foreign Policy at Harvard. Beyond capital, Fernandes gave the first TED Talk on venture capital, created the #1 Startup Pitch Deck template (700,000+ views), and co-created 'The Next Big Thing' board game on entrepreneurship with his wife Jenna.
Vincent Diallo
Vincent Diallo is a French-born, trilingual (French, English, Mandarin) venture capitalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area who brings a rare tri-continental lens to consumer and commerce investing. He is General Partner at Progression, a TikTok-alumni-led fund backing AI-native consumer products, and founder and Managing Partner of Interlace Ventures, a $14M debut fund dedicated to commerce technology. Before moving into venture, he served as CFO of Sinodis in Shanghai — scaling the largest independent Western food distributor in China from $50M to $200M in revenue before its exit — and spent seven years at Deloitte across Paris and Shanghai auditing global giants including LVMH, WPP, and Pernod Ricard. He is also co-founder of Bleu Capital, a transatlantic climate-focused family office.
João Diogo Falcão
João Diogo 'JD' Falcão is the CEO and co-founder of AiFi Inc., the San Francisco-based company building the world's largest autonomous retail network. A PhD from Carnegie Mellon and Master's from Cornell in Robotics, JD spent years shaping AiFi's core technology as CTO before stepping up as Chief Executive in September 2025. Under his and the team's leadership, AiFi has deployed 300+ camera-only autonomous stores globally, processes over 90 petabytes of spatial data annually, and counts Microsoft, ALDI, and 7-Eleven among its partners. His central thesis: the physical world deserves to be as queryable as the internet.
Marcus Shen
Marcus Shen is the CEO and Board Member of B-Stock, the world's largest B2B marketplace for excess merchandise, helping retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Costco efficiently recover value from returned and surplus inventory. A former Yahoo! VP of Corporate Development and KKR advisor, Shen joined B-Stock as CFO in 2019, rose to COO, and took the CEO role in March 2022. Under his leadership, B-Stock has become a defining force in the recommerce economy, selling 160 million units annually and keeping nearly 300,000 tons of inventory out of landfills.
Michael Jaszczyk
Michael Jaszczyk is the CEO (US) of NEWWORK Software, a Berlin and Palo Alto-based startup founded in 2023 by former SAP and Workday veterans to rebuild enterprise software for the AI era. With over two decades of technology leadership - including 15 years at GK Software SE where he rose from CTO to Chief Digital Transformation Officer and CEO of GK Americas - he is a recognized thought leader at the intersection of AI, cloud computing, and enterprise workflow automation. Jaszczyk helped pioneer retail AI as far back as 2003 through the Metro Group Future Store initiative, and today leads NEWWORK's mission to replace legacy ERP, CRM, and HR systems with AI-native, agentic platforms that understand business requirements and generate working solutions in minutes.
Neschae Fernando
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Brandon Hill
Brandon Hill is the co-founder and CEO of Vori, a San Francisco-based B2B operating system for the grocery industry. A Stanford graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Hill grew up surrounded by grocery — his grandparents ran a small store in Oklahoma and his parents spent 40+ years in the industry. He channeled that heritage into Vori, which he co-founded in 2019 with Tre Kirkman and Robert Pinkerton to modernize the technology stack powering America's independent and regional supermarkets. Vori's AI-powered platform, VoriOS, handles point-of-sale, inventory, pricing, supplier integration, and back-office operations for 140+ stores across 55+ cities, having processed over $500 million in payments. The company raised a $22M Series B in May 2026, bringing total funding to over $32M.