RetailNext nearly doubles funding with $15m round from StarVest, Nokia and others

Software company RetailNext, which helps brick-and-mortar retailers analyze how shoppers behave inside their stores, has raised $15 million in a Series C round of funding led by new investor StarVest Partners.

Prior backers August Capital, Nokia Growth Partners and Commerce Ventures participated in the round as well. The Series C round brings the total capital raised by RetailNext to $29 million.

RetailNext posits that its platform brings e-commerce style analytics to physical retail stores, enabling retailers to collect and correlate data from a set of sources that includes video cameras, point-of-sale systems, Wi-Fi devices, and time and attendance apps.

To date, more than 60 retailers have adopted RetailNext to increase store sales, reduce theft and improve the customer experience, including major ones like American Apparel, Bloomingdale’s, Montblanc and Verizon Wireless.

The San Jose, California-based company, formerly known as BVI Networks, claims it tracks more than 400 million shoppers per year by collecting data from more than 30,000 sensors in retail stores, and analyzing ‘trillions of data points’ annually.

RetailNext CEO Alexei Agratchev says:

“Considering that ninety-five percent of purchasing still takes place in the brick-and-mortar channel, it is not surprising that we’ve seen a strong appetite among retailers to collect the factual knowledge about shopper behavior that can directly lead to bottom-line improvement.

This rapid adoption is driving more than triple year-over-year revenue growth for the company.”

And attracting investor interest too, apparently.

RetailNext says it will use the $15 million in freshly injected capital to expand engineering resources, flesh out its platform and grow its operations in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

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