India-based tech startup Infilect raises $1.5 million Pre-Series A funding for its retail visual intelligence SaaS platform

Retail is the focal point of the worldwide economy, impacting millions of businesses and billions of consumers every single day. In today’s competitive retail market, most of these businesses face the same challenges: sales and revenue growth. Enter Infilect, a Bangalore, India-based a B2B SaaS startup that helps global retail brands and retailers with deep visual intelligence.

Infilect has developed digital technologies that empower retail decision-makers and optimize their time and capital. Infilect’s SaaS products and Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision-based technologies continuously optimize retail supply-chain, from manufacturing to distribution to execution across millions of retail stores in global markets.

Today, Infilect announced it has raised $1.5 million in pre-series A financing to expand its go-to-market programs and to continue to invest in the areas of Image Recognition (IR) for retail execution, supply-chain optimization, store personalization, and category planning. The round was led by Mela Ventures and 1Crowd, with participation from The Chennai Angels (TCA).

Founded in 2015 by Anand Prabhu Subramanian (former Bell Labs and IBM Research) and Vijay Gabale (former IBM Research, Ph.D. IIT Bombay), with the vision of the digital transformation of worldwide retail through Image Recognition (IR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Infilect derives intelligence by parsing large-scale visual content such as photos and videos using proprietary deep learning and artificial intelligence technology and provides highly scalable SaaS products for the retail and advertising industries.  In the past 18 months, Infilect has super-charged decision making in some of the global Retail Brands in FMCG, Consumer Electronics, Food & Beverages, Home Improvement sectors across geographies.

“Globally today, Retail Brands lack visibility into presence, placement, positioning, and performance of retail products across a large number of retail stores. The final frontiers, the retail shelves, largely remain undigitized, resulting in out-of-stocks and overstocking; a trillion-dollar inefficiency worldwide,” said Anand Prabhu Subramanian, CEO, and co-founder of Infilect. “InfiViz, our flagship product, leverages IR & AI to process pictures of retail shelves from thousands of retail stores in Modern Trade and General Trade markets. InfiViz instantly generates revenue optimizing action plans, reduces stock-outs, and consequently, improves same-store sales by 2% to 5%.”

With innovations In Image Recognition and AI, Infilect’s products empower the retail industry with unprecedented visibility into omnichannel sales, in-store merchandising, and store operations.

“We are excited to be partnering with Mela Ventures, 1Crowd, and TCA. The investment and mentorship will help us build cutting-edge Deep Technology products and boost our enterprise sales in global markets,” added Vijay Gabale, CTO and co-founder of Infilect.