The merchandising platform teaching modern retail to stop planning in spreadsheets.
TOOLIO / "Plan Smarter, Execute Better" - the company's merchandising dashboard, where buyers replace tabs and formulas with connected, real-time planning.
Every time a jacket is in your size, or a sold-out sneaker restocks the week you wanted it, a chain of decisions made it happen: how much to buy, when, and which store or warehouse should hold it. For decades those decisions ran on spreadsheets - fragile grids of formulas passed between buyers and planners. Toolio, founded in New York in 2019, exists to replace that machinery.
Toolio is a cloud-based, AI-powered merchandising platform. It connects the full arc of retail planning - merchandise financial planning, open-to-buy, assortment planning, demand forecasting, and allocation - into one system that talks to a retailer's ERP, e-commerce, and business-intelligence tools. Instead of reconciling tabs by hand, merchandising teams work from shared, real-time numbers and let the platform surface where demand is heading.
The company's own framing is deliberately unglamorous: make "rocket-science retailing easy and accessible to retailers and teams of all shapes and sizes." The problem it targets is not the storefront or the ad - it is the upstream decision that determines everything downstream: what to make, buy, and place.
Co-founders Eytan Daniyalzade (CEO) and Berk Atikoglu are second-time founders. Their first company, the fashion-discovery app Stylr, was acquired by Walmart Labs in 2014. They stayed five years inside the retail giant, working on projects including Sam's Club Scan & Go and Walmart Pay.
That vantage point became the thesis for Toolio. Even at Walmart's scale, the founders found, the tools that decided what to buy lagged years behind the polished technology that sold it. In 2019 they left to build the merchandising software they wished they'd had.
"Even at a company of that scale, the process was spreadsheet driven."
- Eytan Daniyalzade, Co-Founder & CEOToolio is modular. Retailers can adopt a single workflow or run planning end-to-end. Each module shares the same connected data, so a change in the financial plan flows through to assortment and allocation.
Top-down and bottom-up planning with open-to-buy to align inventory investment with sales targets.
Item and option planning, SKU rationalization, and size-curve generation to build sharper assortments.
Forecasting, seasonality adjustment, and replenishment recommendations to cut stockouts and overstock.
Omnichannel inventory visibility with automated transfer orders and store/item-level forecasting.
AI-driven forecasting, SKU rationalization, and workflow automation with explainable outputs planners can trust.
Built-for-NetSuite certified, plus connections to e-commerce and BI tools - and an MCP server for AI-assisted access.
Retail lives between two costly errors. A stockout is a customer who wanted to buy and couldn't - lost revenue you never see. An overstock is cash buried in a warehouse, waiting to be marked down. Merchandising is the discipline of staying in the narrow band between them, across thousands of SKUs and channels at once.
Legacy planning suites were built for big-box retailers and demand long implementations. The common alternative for modern and direct-to-consumer brands is still Excel. Toolio positions between the two: a connected, real-time platform light enough for lean planning teams, but deep enough to run open-to-buy, assortment, and allocation - with explainable AI rather than black-box forecasts. Customers report concrete results: AKA Brands says its merchants achieved a 50-75% SKU reduction.
Merchandising, planning, buying, and allocation teams at more than 100 retailers and direct-to-consumer brands run on Toolio.
Toolio is a B2B SaaS business: retailers subscribe to the cloud platform, typically integrated with their existing ERP, e-commerce, and BI systems, with pricing scaling by modules and operation size. Around its Series A the company reported roughly 20% month-over-month growth in both revenue and customers.
Its edge is domain fluency. The team pairs retail-industry veterans with engineers drawn from Walmart, NetSuite, Facebook, Microsoft, and McKinsey - a blend meant to speak the planner's language and the platform's at once. The company runs globally, with a New York headquarters and an engineering office in Istanbul, and pairs its software with community resources for merchandising teams.
"Everything we've done this year has been with the intent of creating better opportunities and tools for retailers."
- Eytan Daniyalzade, Co-Founder & CEOThe October 2021 Series A was led by Jump Capital, with Rho Capital's Ignition Fund and returning backers Founder Collective, Notation Capital, and Max Ventures. Reported total funding since founding sits around $10.3M.
The founders sell their fashion-discovery app to Walmart Labs.
After five years at Walmart, Daniyalzade and Atikoglu leave to build modern merchandising software.
Financial planning and assortment tools ship with early venture support.
Jump Capital leads the round to scale platform and team.
Omnichannel allocation launches; Toolio earns Built-for-NetSuite status.
Deeper AI forecasting, SKU rationalization, and workflow automation.
"Toolio enabled merchants to achieve 50-75% SKU reduction."
- Stacey Shriefer, VP Inventory Planning, AKA BrandsToolio is a cloud-based, AI-powered merchandising platform that helps retailers plan what to buy, how much, and where to allocate it - covering financial planning, open-to-buy, assortment, demand forecasting, and allocation.
It was founded in 2019 by Eytan Daniyalzade (CEO) and Berk Atikoglu, both former Walmart engineers who previously built and sold the app Stylr.
Toolio raised a $10.3M Series A in October 2021 led by Jump Capital, bringing total reported funding to roughly $10-12M.
More than 100 retailers and D2C brands - including Peloton, Bombas, Rothy's, Shinola, KUIU, and Fleet Feet - use Toolio, which has managed over $1B in inventory.
It replaces spreadsheet-driven planning with a connected, real-time platform that integrates with ERP, e-commerce, and BI systems and adds explainable AI forecasting - designed for lean, modern planning teams.