Retail intelligence company Trax today announced the closing of a $64 million financing round led by an affiliate of Warburg Pincus with the participation of previous investors. The investment makes Warburg Pincus the largest institutional shareholder in Trax. The proceeds will be used to continue Trax's innovation in providing customers with continuous and actionable in-store retail insights, and drive its capacity to serve across its core markets in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia.
Founded in 2010 by CEO Joel Bar-El and chief commercial officer Dror Feldheim, Trax has raised well over $150 million since its inception and closed a $19.5 million financing round in February 2017 led by Investec Bank and $40 million last June. Headquartered in Singapore, more than half the company's employees are in its Tel Aviv development center.
Trax provides in-store execution, market intelligence and data science solutions for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies and retailers by harnessing its cutting-edge computer vision platform to process photos taken in store and deliver granular store-level insights within minutes. It combines state-of-the-art fine grained recognition, machine learning and data collection methods to build a proprietary retail database and analytics products. With tens of billions of dollars spent on trade promotion, CPG companies and retailers are razor focused on their in-store execution and increasingly strategic with its planning to yield optimal results.
Bar-El said, "This has been an extremely exciting year for Trax. This latest financing round and our alliance with Nielsen demonstrate that we are making big and bold moves into the retail space worldwide. We look forward to working closely with our new partner, Warburg Pincus, to tap into their deep relationships in the retail and technology sectors across our key markets with the goal of further accelerating our global growth."
Feldheim said, "This investment is a solid endorsement of our technology and services. The whole Trax team has worked incredibly hard to get the company into the position it is today - delivering impressive and demonstrable business value for our customers."
Trax's solutions allow CPG companies and retailers to cost-effectively track their in-store execution gaps and shelf compliance, and give them the critical tools to optimize distribution, merchandising, pricing, and implement a perfect shelf. Trax is headquartered in Singapore with a Computer Vision Centre of Excellence in Israel and offices worldwide. The company has global market coverage with over 6 billion product images indexed, in over 1 million stores across 50 countries. It serves many of the top 20 CPG manufacturers in the world including Coca-Cola, AB InBev, Nestle and Henkel.
In the recent alliance with Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN), the leading global performance management company, the two companies have introduced a new, joint-solution known as Shelf Intelligence Suite. Nielsen, a global leader in retail measurement and analytics services, holds the largest CPG point of sale dataset in the industry. Together, Nielsen's Retail Measurement Services (RMS), Trax's computer vision platform and both companies analytics capabilities will help manufacturers better understand the relationship of merchandising conditions to category sales. This unprecedented level of shelf insights will be a syndicated offering to allow brands to continuously measure and improve their shelf strategy and execution to boost sales. It is expected to become the "go-to" retail platform for all market intelligence.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 28, 2017
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