RADAR, a New York-based company that combines RFID with computer vision to automate inventory management, analytics, and checkout in physical stores, announced it raised $16 million in funding from Sound Ventures (the venture firm launched by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary), Japan-based NTT Group, and two billion dollar publicly traded retailers that are also leading RADAR customers. With this funding round, RADAR plans to deploy its proprietary hardware and software platform across three enterprise customers.
Founded by CEO Spencer Hewett, COO Michael E. Murphy, and CTO Adam Blair, RADAR is helping brick-and-mortar retailers stay competitive against Amazon’s online and offline businesses by helping them improve in-store inventory management and create e-commerce quality analytics in physical stores. Plus RADAR also offers autonomous checkout services for its partners.
“The rise of Amazon and direct-to-consumer brands has created unprecedented consumer expectations around speed and convenience. While enabling autonomous checkout will play a part in meeting these changing expectations, it’s definitely not the foundational part that brick and mortar retailers are focused on today,” said Hewett in a statement. “Retailers still don’t know exactly what they have in their stores, let alone where it is, and it’s costing them billions. By combining RFID and Computer Vision, we’ve created the only solution on the market that allows retailers to know exactly where all their products are in real-time in 3D, from the floor of a fitting room to the highest stockroom shelf. This allows retailers to make every last unit available to all customers both in-store and online.”
RADAR’s technology is able to locate products more quickly and accurately than other solutions in the space and enables it to track products in real-time to the slightest movements. This is done using RADAR’s custom-made sensors, which utilizes proprietary systems, algorithms, and signal processing methods for creating a defensible and scalable solution for retailers.
“RFID technology was originally designed to help retailers improve inventory management, but most solutions remain highly manual, limited in capability or too expensive to deploy,” added Blair. “Computer vision solutions, on the other hand, have been focused on small convenience stores with controlled store layouts because this technology alone has major challenges scaling to large, varied formats with different product categories. We recognize the power of truly integrating RFID and Computer Vision. This is why we’ve gone through the effort of developing proprietary, advanced signal processing methods and a proprietary sensor that allows us to realize the benefits of both technologies. In doing so, we’ve created a scalable solution that not only solves inventory management but also enables e-commerce quality analytics and autonomous checkout in all retail stores.”
RADAR’s inventory management system helps solve one of the biggest problems for retailers. As a result of out of stock and overstock issues, retailers lose $1.1 trillion globally. With the installation of its fully integrated platform, RADAR is able to capture all in-store inventory data and present it to retail employees in an actionable way. And retailers will be able to know what is available and where it is in real-time 3D. This creates the opportunity to increase sales in stores and online while also reducing excess throughout the supply chain.
The proprietary technology built by RADAR captures every single consumer-product interaction down to the slightest movement of a product. So retailers can begin analyzing physical stores just like e-commerce sites. And with future software updates, RADAR’s platform will be able to measure customer engagement with specific products to the productivity of employees performing specific tasks.
In terms of autonomous checkout, the same software update is also able to unlock the feature. So this could create value for retailers from day one.
“RFID has traditionally been good for managing inventory,” added Beanstalk Ventures managing partner Ken Seiff. “But RADAR’s new, proprietary approach that combines RFID and Computer Vision will open up entirely new profit opportunities for all retailers. It has the potential to become the central nervous system for retail operations. This is the kind of team and technology we love to back.”
