Technologist - Adventurer - New Yorker
Trevor Sumner
He listens to the whole internet so a billion-dollar brand can figure out what to make next.
CEO, i-Genie.ai // Managing Director, Summoner // Princeton CS '98
He listens to the whole internet so a billion-dollar brand can figure out what to make next.
CEO, i-Genie.ai // Managing Director, Summoner // Princeton CS '98
Most market research starts with a questionnaire and a focus group of forty strangers in a beige conference room. Trevor Sumner thinks that is a quaint way to learn what billions of people already typed into a search bar at 2 a.m.
As CEO of i-Genie.ai, Sumner runs an engine that synthesizes hundreds of billions of Google searches, online reviews, and social and video posts into something a chief marketing officer can actually use: real-time consumer insight, brand-equity tracking, market trends, and ready-to-test product R&D ideas. The customer list reads like the cereal aisle and the cleaning aisle put together - Unilever, Coca-Cola, Kenvue, Clorox.
The pitch is simple and a little subversive. The signals already exist. People announce their cravings, complaints, and unmet needs every day, in public, for free. The hard part was never collecting opinions. It was hearing all of them at once and turning the noise into a decision.
i-Genie was founded by Stan Sthanunathan and Paul Van Gendt, who ran consumer insights at Unilever and Coca-Cola before deciding the whole discipline needed a reboot. They brought in Sumner to scale it - a builder who has spent 25 years turning early technology into companies people pay for.
His operating creed fits on a sticky note: "Create clarity, execute decisively, and compound impact. AI is a force multiplier, not a crutch." He uses the second half as a warning. The model is not the product. The decision is.
"AI is a force multiplier, not a crutch."- Trevor Sumner
In 2017, Sumner took over Perch Interactive, the company behind those store displays that light up and react when you pick up a product. Year one, the business grew 127%. The displays piled up awards - a spot on the Forbes 15 Tech Companies to Watch, the Edison Gold Medal for Retail Innovation, a CIO Review Top 20, plus Clio and Digi hardware.
Then 2020 arrived and emptied the stores. Roughly 70% of Perch's recurring revenue evaporated, because a company built on in-store experiences does not do well when nobody is allowed in the store. "It was harrowing," he says, without dressing it up.
He did not fold it. He steered Perch through the collapse and into an acquisition by Raydiant, where he became Head of AI and Innovation and rebuilt the platform around computer vision and data. The lesson he kept is unglamorous and durable: "It taught me that I could withstand most of anything. And that I am lucky now to not be in a position to have to."
"Pressure is a privilege."- Trevor Sumner
Before the AI insights engine, before the interactive displays, there was a kid from a city that never sleeps with a Princeton computer science degree and a taste for the bleeding edge of whatever came next.
Rethink Retail has named Sumner a Top Retail Expert six years running, 2021 through 2026. The Retail Tech Innovation Hub keeps him in its Top 50. Corporate Vision once handed him the title Most Influential CEO in Visual Merchandising, which is a sentence that should not exist and somehow does.
The personal site bills him as "Technologist, Adventurer, New Yorker," and the middle word is doing real work. The man who reads a billion search queries for a living spends his time off underwater, off the grid, and occasionally below the Arctic Circle in his underwear.
He landed a 600 lb Black Marlin - a fish roughly the weight of a vending machine, on the other end of a line.
A two-week expedition out of Ushuaia, Argentina, aboard a Russian research ship. He has now scuba dived on every continent.
By his own account he "jumped into the waters below the Arctic Circle in nothing but my skivvies." We did not ask for a photo.
Swam through underground rivers in Cuba, toured Hemingway's old residence, and brought home art by Cuban painter Javier Guerra.
Plus a basketball championship or two. The startup metabolism does not switch off on weekends.
A photography enthusiast and wine connoisseur who once sampled honey-sealed Cuban cigars. Curiosity is the through-line.
"I grew up with the metabolism of the city that never sleeps, which prepared me for a life of startup entrepreneurship, with everything coming at you all the time."
"Some of the greatest successes in my career are not on my LinkedIn profile, they are the people early in their careers whom I have mentored and have become incredible powerhouses of their own."
"Personal and professional balance is a zen-like but elusive desire; accomplishing great things requires sacrifice. I try to carve out what matters most to me."
"That level of growth is incredible and also uncomfortable."
"It taught me that I could withstand most of anything. And that I am lucky now to not be in a position to have to."
"Create clarity, execute decisively, and compound impact."