Eileen raises $1M pre-Seed to bring AI-powered shelf intelligence to CPG brands

Walk into any grocery store, and you’ll see millions spent on packaging, branding, and promotions competing for attention on a crowded shelf. Yet many consumer brands still have little visibility into what happens once their products reach retail. Shelves run empty. Displays are misplaced. Promotions never make it to the floor.

A young retail intelligence startup called Eileen wants to fix that blind spot.

The retail technology company announced it has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding, led by Top Shelf Ventures, to grow a platform that shows brands what’s really happening inside stores in real time. The new capital will fund hiring, product development, and a broader push into the consumer packaged goods (CPG) market.

At the center of the company’s approach is a system called Performance Hub, a platform that combines store-level data gathered by a distributed network of field “Shoppers” with AI-driven analysis. The goal is simple: give brands immediate insight into shelf conditions and help them act on it.

For many CPG companies, the last mile of retail execution remains the hardest part of the business. Marketing budgets are massive, distribution networks stretch across thousands of stores, yet brands often rely on delayed reports or incomplete data to track what happens after products ship.

Eileen founder and CEO Jordan Karcher says that disconnect was the motivation behind the company.

“Retail execution is the single most critical, and often most broken, part of the CPG story,” said Jordan Karcher, Founder and CEO of Eileen Inc. “Brands spend billions on marketing and distribution, only to lose at the shelf because they have no visibility into what’s truly happening in-store. We built Eileen to give brands an on-demand, real-time view of the shelf at a fraction of the cost of legacy solutions.”

With $1M Pre-Seed in Funding, Retail Intelligence Startup Eileen Aims to Turn Real-Time Shelf Data into Actionable Insights for CPG Brands

Eileen’s system collects photo-verified shelf data from stores and feeds it into the company’s analytics engine. The platform then turns that data into operational signals that brands can act on immediately, whether the issue is an out-of-stock product, a missing display, or a pricing error.

Investors say the opportunity is larger than it appears. Billions of dollars are lost every year when products fail to reach shelves properly or remain unavailable at key moments. Traditional retail auditing tools often require heavy infrastructure and long reporting cycles, leaving many brands without timely insight.

Jason Sherman, Managing Partner at Top Shelf Ventures, believes the retail intelligence startup is tackling a problem that has lingered across the CPG industry for decades.

“Eileen is solving a massive, persistent problem with an elegant and scalable solution,” said Jason Sherman, Managing Partner at Top Shelf Ventures. “The CPG industry loses billions of dollars every year to out-of-stocks and poor shelf execution, and the existing tools to address this are expensive, slow, and inaccessible to most brands. Eileen flips that model entirely by delivering real-time, photo-verified shelf data at a fraction of the cost. We believe Eileen has the potential to become the definitive data layer for retail execution intelligence, and we are thrilled to partner with Jordan and his team.”

The startup plans to use the new funding to strengthen its AI infrastructure, hire additional engineers, and expand its go-to-market efforts. Karcher’s vision centers on turning Eileen into the operational layer that connects what happens on store floors with the decisions brands make at headquarters.

Eileen Inc. positions itself as a retail execution engine built for modern consumer brands. Its platform pairs AI-based analytics with a centralized command interface that tracks store performance and translates shelf data into actions brands can take across their retail networks.

Top Shelf Ventures, which led the round, focuses on early-stage investments across CPG and adjacent sectors. The firm backs companies operating across categories such as alcohol, nicotine, cannabis-adjacent beverages, and emerging consumer technologies.

If Eileen delivers on its promise, it may give brands something the industry has chased for years: a clear view of what’s happening on store shelves at the moment it matters most.

Eileen founder Jordan Karcher (Credit: Mendoza School of Business)