Understanding the Retail Technology Ecosystem
At this time, we are tracking 980 Retail Technology companies across 24 categories, with a combined funding amount of $18.7B. These are companies that have anything and everything to do with retail tech.
See the breakdown in sector funding and the most updated market information at http://insights.venturescanner.com/venture-scanner-sector-maps/.
Retail Technology Market Map
Local Daily Deals: Companies that sell locally available, pre-paid vouchers for steeply discounted goods and services. This category also includes daily deal aggregators.
Last Mile Logistics: Companies that are innovating on the last phase of the supply chain, from the store/warehouse to the consumer.
Social Discovery: This category includes companies that allow for discovery through location check-ins and social sharing of ideas, products, companies, brands, etc.
Point of Sale 2.0: New point-of-sale solutions that create frictionless consumer transaction experiences and also enable retailers to collect data about their customers that can be leveraged for marketing and CRM purposes.
Local Incentives: These companies help stores increase loyalty, customer base, and revenue from both new and repeat customers through deals, local offers, discounts, frequency rewards, gamified badges, and other techniques.
Online to Offline Payments: Technologies and services that are changing the way we pay for goods. In addition to payment execution, this also includes companies that provide consumers with a mobile wallet (e.g. payment information, loyalty cards) or other digital storage functionality (e.g. receipts).
Automated Personalization Platforms: Automated Personalization Platforms work with customers (e.g. retailers) to deliver custom ads, marketing messages, and dynamically optimize site pages for different users.
Loyalty Programs: Products that provide or power a merchant’s reward / loyalty program. Examples include digital frequent shopper cards, tailored rewards based on spending, etc.
Marketing Platforms and CRM: Products that enable merchants / brands to engage with their customers across social media channels, and execute and manage marketing campaigns. This category also includes customer relationship management tools used to improve customer communication, tracking, and overall relations.
Coupons: Companies that focus on both traditional and digital merchant coupons.
Gift Cards: This category includes both physical and digital stored-value and prepaid cards.
Retargeting: Retargeting companies use cookie data to follow online users and serve dynamic, relevant ads all over the web.
Product Recommendation: Product Recommendation companies use crowdsourced data, individual stylists, and/or automated algorithms to determine the best products for a given shopper based on their individual preferences.
Infrastructure and Enablers: Products and tools designed to help developers increase functionality in their existing products (e.g. payment integration), create applications (e.g. mobile apps, websites), etc .
Data and Analytics: These companies help with the acquisition, organization, and distribution of data that companies can then utilize to enhance their applications and service offerings.
Physical Store Analytics and Indoor Mapping: Using sensors, cameras, and mobile devices to provide retailers more data about customer behavior in-store such as window conversion rate, customer dwell time, optimal shelf placement, and ideal store hours. These companies help retailers optimize the customer experience to increase revenue.
In-store Personalization: In-store Personalization providers use physical inputs (e.g. video feeds, beacons, CRM) to customize content that can be delivered via mobile devices, social media, and other similar channels.
In-store Experience: Companies that enable brick and mortar retailers to enhance the customer journey through digital engagement, mobile-first initiatives, gamification, and more.
Search and Local Availability: The companies in this category provide the means by which consumers can search and/or compare local availability of products and prices. This includes innovations such as store-level inventory searches and local comparisons.
Local Advertising Technology: Companies that alert the consumer of a retail product or service. The advertising models in the O2O market often center around targeted ads, real-time mobile ads, retargeting, dynamic ads based on proximity to clear inventory, ads targeted based on check-ins or social comments, and in-store up-sell ads.
Made-to-Measure Customization: Made-to-Measure Customization companies use proprietary technologies and supply chain processes to enable shoppers to create custom goods.
Retail IoT: This category covers physical devices that have a retail application (e.g. beacons).
Price and Feature Comparison: Services that empower consumers to compare product prices at different outlets or compare features across similar products (e.g. scan and engage capabilities for QR codes, bar codes, or physical items to bring up product information and comparisons in real-time).
Retail Augmented Reality: Companies that enable consumers to interact with products using augmented reality (e.g. virtual manipulation).
Venture Scanner enables corporations to research, identify, and connect with the most innovative technologies and companies. We do this through a unique combination of our data, technology, and expert analysts. If you have any questions, reach out to[email protected].