Physical retail has always had a data problem. E-commerce operators know exactly where every item is, how long it sat, and when it moved. Brick-and-mortar chains, by contrast, have run on cycle counts, manual audits, and educated guesses — a structural disadvantage that compounds across thousands of SKUs and hundreds of stores. RADAR, an AI-powered retail intelligence platform, just raised $170 million in Series B funding at a $1 billion valuation to close that gap, with Gideon Strategic Partners and Nimble Partners co-leading and Align Ventures participating.
The thesis is straightforward: eighty percent of global commerce still happens in physical stores, and almost none of it has the real-time inventory layer that online retail treats as table stakes. RADAR’s platform addresses this with proprietary overhead sensors mounted on store ceilings that read every RFID-tagged item continuously, tracking location and movement across the sales floor, stockroom, and fitting rooms. That sensor data feeds into a software layer that converts raw location signals into operational actions — replenishment alerts, omnichannel fulfillment routing, loss prevention triggers, merchandising intelligence — integrated into retailers’ existing systems. The company claims 99 percent item-level inventory accuracy in real-time, processing more than 100 billion item-level events per day.
The commercial footprint is already substantial. RADAR is deployed across more than 1,400 stores with retailers including American Eagle Outfitters and Old Navy. American Eagle, described as the first retailer to implement the technology fleet-wide, credits the system with improved inventory visibility and sharper operational insights. That deployment scale also matters structurally: each installation adds to what the company positions as a proprietary dataset on how customers physically interact with products — behavioral intelligence that has no online equivalent and grows more valuable with every additional store.
The funding will go toward accelerating deployments, developing next-generation sensor hardware, expanding AI analytics, building out autonomous checkout capabilities, and entering new geographies including Canada, EMEA, and Latin America. The company also appointed Abi Viswanathan as CFO, a former Nuro CFO who was also an early member of Uber’s strategic finance team — a hire that signals RADAR is organizing for scale, not just growth.
The broader framing the company is pushing — physical AI — positions RADAR not just as a retail operations tool but as the foundation layer for real-time intelligence across any industry where physical assets move through space. Retail is the proof of concept. The $1 billion valuation suggests investors believe the category is considerably larger than that.