Real-Time Inventory and Task Tracker Continues Exponential Growth, Unlocking Revenue and Savings Across Retail Ecosystem
Augmodo, the real-time inventory and task tracker using spatial AI to improve efficiency and convenience for retailers, brands and consumers, announced the close of a $37.5M Series A funding round. The investment was led by TQ Ventures, with participation from existing investors Lerer Hippeau, NewFare, WIN and Interlace, who joined new investors Arena Holdings – an investment firm founded by Feroz Dewan, former Managing Director at Tiger Global, as well as Jefferson River Capital – the family office of Tony James, former President and COO of Blackstone Group.
“We’ve tried other solutions but they only provide a rearview snapshot – Augmodo allows us to be armed with 24/7 strategic information so we can be agile to customer and store demands – Augmodo is the future.”
Retail will be the most disrupted industry by spatial AI – it has the largest physical workforce and physical data problems. Founded in 2023, Augmodo’s wearable SmartBadges™ create live 3D store maps powered by a spatial AI assistant, which recommends actions to store associates, solving various issues on retail floors. Augmodo’s technology increases efficiency and makes store associates even more valuable – it helps them restock shelves, place orders, and improve compliance – saving stores time and money and improving retailer, associate, brand, and shopper experiences.
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Compared to other CV solutions, like robots, SmartBadges collect ten times more frequent data, are 100 times cheaper and set-up speed and simplicity are unrivaled – hardware is installed in less than 20 minutes and results in 100% passive data collection – associates simply walk the aisles as they normally do while the SmartBadge conducts high-frequency scans hundreds of times daily, for the benefit of retailers and brands alike.
“Augmodo was created to transform the physical world of shopping with spatial computing and wearables. Initially, we thought it would take many years to show this much progress toward our goal,” said Ross Finman, Founder and CEO at Augmodo. “We’re proud our team achieved our Series A milestone faster than we anticipated and based on these results, we’re able to continue growing our technology across the world’s most innovative retailers.”
Just last fall, the company raised a $5.3M seed, and followed up with this Series A round less than a year later. Their launch customer, Chemist Warehouse, saw such value in their pilot that they invested in the business after experiencing a significant reduction in stockouts, saving inventory and labor costs. The collaboration has also resulted in the development of a fourth-generation version of the wearable SmartBadge, to be unveiled later this year.
“The simplicity of Augmodo allowed us to test and expand rapidly – and beyond us, we see how that’s driving exceptional demand,” said Mark Finocchiaro, Managing Partner, CIO & Director at Chemist Warehouse, Australia’s largest pharmacy retailer with 535 locations internationally. “Augmodo provides preconfigured kits for associates to simply plug in, charge and go. By providing Spatial AI assistants to our associates, Augmodo has made their role even more critical – they can instantly capture invaluable shelf information multiple times daily.”
“We’re thrilled to partner with Augmodo as they modernize the largest labor workforce in the world,” said Andrew Marks, Co-Managing Partner at TQ Ventures. “Our strong retail relationships combined with Augmodo’s innovative tech results in a dynamic and strategic partnership that helps retailers and customers provide immediate value today, solving out of stocks, inventory visibility, and in-store tasks, while laying the spatial data groundwork for the future of physical retail. As AI moves into the real world, there is a massive opportunity for enterprise use cases with wearables, the biggest being the physical data challenges in retail.”
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SpatialView™ is Augmodo’s analytics platform for retail executives and brand partners, which provides real-time visibility into shelf conditions. Instead of having staff travel endlessly to store locations, or viewing week- or month-old data, business leaders can see what’s happening in real time inside any store from their laptop.
“Knowing shelf gaps exist so we can diagnose and solve them is one of the biggest challenges of a supplier,” said Christian Armstrong, Chief Customer Officer of L’Oreal Australia / New Zealand. “We’ve tried other solutions but they only provide a rearview snapshot – Augmodo allows us to be armed with 24/7 strategic information so we can be agile to customer and store demands – Augmodo is the future.”
This influx of capital will allow Augmodo to continue expanding, scaling to hundreds of stores in 2025, with both brands and retailers, and to more than a thousand in the next 18 months, growing retail channels, geographies, speed and scale.