Top Retail Technology Startups in 2027

Nash enables businesses to reliably deliver. The company exists to democratize local delivery for business across all industries and sizes. Nash uses the power of technology to build user-friendly infrastructure and smart interfaces that enable all merchants to exceed the rapidly evolving expectations of today and tomorrow's consumer.

Placer.ai is a fast-growing big data startup led by seasoned executives and repeat entrepreneurs who are building the world's first "Google Analytics for the physical world" platform. Placer.ai’s platform provides instant visibility into any property in the U.S., presenting accurate details about visitation patterns and demographic breakdowns of visitors. Placer.ai’s customers can see where visitors have been before, where they go afterwards, where they typically go for sports, entertainment, groceries, etcetera, and what their interests are. Placer.ai's A.I.-based SaaS platform replaces archaic solutions such as manual surveys, installed cameras and other people counting systems, thus creating a blue ocean market of more than $100B. Placer.ai has grown 3x year-over-year for the past 3 years, counting more than 500 paying customers across a range of industries, including 2 of the world’s top 10 retailers, 2 of the top 10 CPG firms worldwide, a world’s top hospitality firm, 2 of the world’s top 10 commercial real estate (CRE) firms and 2 of the world’s top multinational asset managers and hedge funds. Placer has just raised its $50M Series B funding.

Happy Returns is transforming e-commerce by solving the #1 pain point of online shopping: returns. We do this by providing the method of returns that customers overwhelmingly prefer – in person returns – through a network of physical Return Bars staffed by friendly, highly-trained Returnistas located in premier shopping centers, corporate and college campuses and other convenient spots. With Happy Returns, shoppers get a return method that is easy, friendly, free, involves no packing or shipping, and provides an immediate refund. Retailers using Happy Returns save money through aggregation and enjoy increased conversions and customer loyalty and satisfaction. Join the Happy Returns team as we make returns beautiful and usher in the next generation of happy shopping.

MoodMe is an innovative B2B tech leader on a mission to revolutionize the way businesses engage and gain insights through AIaaS and enterprise agreements. By leveraging the power of Face AI technologies, we create experiences that are not just engaging but profoundly insightful, providing a window into the hearts and minds of the target audience. Our vision is to set the standard in empathetic engagement, where user-centric experiences boost customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and drive outstanding performance across diverse industries. At our core, we are dedicated to uniting innovation and ethics to craft an AI landscape that is unbiased and empathetic, ultimately making a powerful positive impact on a global scale. And this is only the beginning!

About Clear Demand: Clear Demand is the leader in AI-driven price and promotion optimization for retailers. Our platform transforms pricing from a challenge to a competitive advantage, helping retailers make smarter, data-backed decisions across the entire pricing lifecycle. By integrating competitive intelligence, pricing rules, and demand modelling, we enable retailers to maximize profit, drive growth, and enhance customer loyalty — all while maintaining pricing compliance and brand integrity. With Clear Demand, retailers stay ahead of the market, automate complex pricing decisions, and unlock new opportunities for growth.

As retail's first omni-channel CRM, Endear empowers salespeople to do their best work over remote channels like email and text when face-to-face selling is slow or simply not an option.

RetailNext is a retail analytics company focused on developing technology that enables store owners to measure store performance, identify opportunities for growth, implement strategies that drive results, increase savings, and boost bottom-line sales. With a comprehensive list of retail marketing solutions and in-store analytical services, RetailNext is helping stores maximize the efficiency and efficacy of marketing and sales tactics.

We measure data across the largest online retailers to give you the most complete view of trends and consumer shopping behavior. And we’re constantly evolving, not only in terms of what we measure, but in how our insights can help you make better decisions. Our products are supported by industry-leading data science practices and technology. The data algorithms and software we’ve developed aggregate, transform and connect the world’s largest knowledge base of e-commerce sales data into a single easy-to-use platform that empowers businesses to make more informed product, marketing and operations decisions.

Flatlay is the end to end social commerce automation platform for brands, creatives & customers. We provide publishing tools that help anyone start a digital storefront in seconds codelessly while empowering brands and retailers to activate community and content loyalty programs. The platform has automation processes around product annotation and content delivery through a publishing scheduler helping both ends monetize the relationship. By aligning incentives with customers, fans and followers - we help to instill a Content Loyalty Program for brands to become digitally native and own the DTC relationship. Flatlay provides a suite of publishing tools allowing users to codelessly create a digital storefront in seconds. Through content driven commerce, the social marketplace network further empowers the creator economy. Users build shop-able collections to generate revenue from affiliate sales with the ability to be sponsored directly by brands for customized content. This is all done through an automated SaaS platform where brands & retailers tap into the campaign work-flow system. Clients effectively match with the right creative brand advocates at scale using the power of machine learning in a self-serve custom relationship management portal. Our vision is to evolve the way commerce is conducted online by removing intermediaries cutting into margins while empowering brands and retailers the most streamlined way to go direct to consumer. By building a social commerce marketplace, we evolve the way that e-commerce is done by placing content at the forefront and eliminating many of the headaches associated with logistics.