Infilect, a retail visual intelligence SaaS provider to the worldwide retail industry, today announced a USD 1.5 million pre-series A financing led by Mela Ventures and 1Crowd, with participation from The Chennai Angels (TCA).
With the investment, Infilect will expand its go-to-market programs, and will continue to invest in the areas of Image Recognition (IR) for retail execution, supply-chain optimization, store personalization, and category planning.
Infilect was started by Anand Prabhu Subraman (former Bell Labs and IBM Research) and Vijay Gabale (former IBM Research, PHD IIT Bombay), with the vision of the digital transformation of worldwide retail through Image Recognition (IR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In the past 18 months, Infilect has super-charged decision making in some of the global retail brands in FMCG, consumer electronics, food & beverages, home improvement sectors across geographies.
"Globally today, Retail Brands lack visibility into presence, placement, positioning, and performance of retail products across a large number of retail stores. The final frontiers, the retail shelves, largely remain undigitized, resulting in out-of-stocks and overstocking; a trillion-dollar inefficiency worldwide," said Anand Prabhu Subraman, CEO, and co-founder of Infilect.
"InfiViz, our flagship product, leverages IR & AI to process pictures of retail shelves from thousands of retail stores in modern trade and general trade markets. InfiViz instantly generates revenue optimizing action plans, reduces stock-outs, and consequently, improves same-store sales by 2 per cent to 5 per cent," added Anand.
"We are excited to be partnering with Mela Ventures, 1Crowd, and TCA. The investment and mentorship will help us build cutting-edge Deep Technology products and boost our enterprise sales in global markets," added Vijay Gabale, CTO and Co-founder of Infilect.
"Infilect's products automate traditional retail processes with speed, accuracy, and on a large scale. Thereby, Infilect empowers decision-makers in the entire orgzation, from associates to category owners to sales leaders, with unprecedented insights and actions. We see a great potential in 'team Infilect' to build a world-class Enterprise SaaS company out of India, and we are thrilled to be partnering with Anand and Vijay through our maiden investment," said Parthasarathy NS, Managing Partner, Mela Ventures.
"Computer vision technology has the potential to unlock significant value in the retail sector in the areas of retail execution, customer insights, and marketing. We are pleased to see Infilect gain confidence in Indian as well as global consumer brands. We are excited to be supporting Anand and Vijay in their quest to digitally transform retail operations worldwide," said Girichandra Kuchangi, Partner, 1Crowd.
"For superior delivery of retail products across multiple channels, retail brands need deep insights from visual data in offline stores. Infilect's founders have unique research and technology background to create magical experiences and extract mengful actions from visual data captured in diverse retail environments," added Lakshmi Narayanan, Co-Founder, Cognizant and a Chennai Angel investor. In conjunction with the investment round, Rostow Ravanan, an IC Member of Mela Ventures, will be joining Infilect's board of directors.
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( With inputs from ANI )
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