Computer vision company enabling retail store insights receives $64 million in funding

Trax, a company that has developed a computer vision platform designed to provide data insights for consumer packaged goods companies and retailers, has received $64 million in funding.

Led by global private equity firm Warburg Pincus, the investment 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: US, Europe, Latin America and Asia, according to a press release.

With Trax, images of store shelves are captured via mobile apps, fixed cameras, or robots, and proprietary computer vision and deep learning algorithms are used to identify objects. From there, Trax produces digitized shelf data with every single stock keeping unit (SKU; e.g. Coca Cola 300 ml) or object (price label), with approximately 96% accuracy. GPUs are used to accelerate image recognition, deep learning, and analytics applications, and algorithms are used to detect anomolies such as incomplete shelf capture and spot new SKUs. The infrastructure is cloud-agnostic, avaialble at 99.95%, enabling Trax to recognize 5 million images per month

Trax offers three computer vision-based products:

• Retail Execution: This product enables field reps of consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies and third-party auditors to capture shelf data with mobile phones and tablets and receive real-time reports on corrective actions to take in the store.
• Shelf Intelligence Suite (by Trax and Nielsen): This product provides continuous and accurate retail measurement and analysis based on category shelf and point of sale data
• Retail Watch: This product delivers real-time store monitoring analytics for retailers to reduce stockouts and improve planogram compliance.

With these capabilities, CPG companies and retailers receive “granular store-level insights,” to cost-effectively track in-store execution gaps and shelf compliance, and provide tools to optimize distribution, merchandising, pricing, and implement a perfect shelf.

"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." said Joel Bar-El, CEO of Trax.

Jeffrey Perlman, Managing Director and Head of Southeast Asia of Warburg Pincus, commented, "Trax has the potential to become the one stop "go to" solution for all retail info – essentially the 'Bloomberg of Retail'. Machine learning underpins Trax' computer vision technology which is an important area of focus for Warburg Pincus and we look forward to working with Joel and the Trax team to further expand its market-leading offerings."

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, according to the company.

View more information on Trax.

Share your vision-related news by contacting James Carroll, Senior Web Editor, Vision Systems Design

To receive news like this in your inbox, click here.

Join our LinkedIn group | Like us on Facebook | Follow us on Twitter

Learn more: search the Vision Systems Design Buyer's Guide for companies, new products, press releases, and videos