store-operations
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Starmount put the internet in the sales associate’s pocket
The Austin software company gave store teams the information online shoppers already had. Its path from mobile checkout to Infor shows why the most useful retail innovation may be the plumbing.
RetailNext counts the customers your till never sees
A receipt tells you who bought. RetailNext measures who walked in, where they went, and what happened before they left - giving store operators a better way to judge performance.
Purna Mishra Has Been Scheduling the Future Since Before Retail Knew It Needed One
From aircraft maintenance to grocery aisles, the Logile founder has spent four decades turning unruly operations into plans. His newest bet is that retail can see trouble months before it reaches the schedule.
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?
The Shelf Is Lying. Retail Insight Wants the Truth.
Retailers have oceans of data and five minutes to act. Retail Insight's bet is that the valuable product is not another dashboard - it is the next task, ranked, explained and pushed to the person who can fix the shelf.
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.
How Maverik Turned the Gas Station Into an Adventure Brand
A Wyoming two-pump station became an 818-store retail system by treating every fuel stop like the trailhead to somewhere better. Its real product is not gasoline alone - it is momentum.
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.
Zipline
Zipline (formerly Retail Zipline) is a San Francisco-based SaaS platform built to fix the broken chain between retail headquarters and the store floor. It bundles communication, task management, audits, and training into one operations platform used by chains like Sephora, Gap, Rite Aid, AEO, LUSH, and L.L.Bean to run thousands of stores in sync.