Top 10
We focused our Power List on venture-backed tech companies creating value and driving impact in the most critical areas for brands and retailers today, including marketing, merchandising, and loyalty. The post-pandemic customer wants it fast, customized, and secure, and these vendors are helping retailers’ and brands’ customers interact more effectively and elegantly than ever before.
Rising Stars
Our inaugural set of Rising Stars are the leaders of tomorrow, building infrastructure, platforms, and tools that enable retailers and brands to create stronger, valuable ties with consumers. Prediction: these up-and-comer’s names (including a few new AI-centric players) will start popping up in all of your retail and commerce newsletters in the next six months. Click each logo to learn more.
Executive Summary
It’s no secret that it’s a pretty tough time right now for retail. Most every article and tweet is all doom and gloom in our industry. But if history is our guide, some of the most important commerce and marketing-tech vendors will thrive in this time of unrest in the market.
Hi! My name is Scott Friend, and I’m a Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, where I invest in early stage commerce and marketing-tech companies. I’m also a former founder of a venture-backed commerce-tech company (which we sold to Oracle back in 2005), and I vividly remember how important early signals of validation — like third-party awards — can be when trying to gain traction and demonstrate product-market fit. That’s why my co-sponsors, Aaron Cheris from Bain & Company and Deborah Weinswig from Coresight Research, and I decided to launch this survey to bring together and recognize the most impressive, thoughtful minds in our industry and start building a community for both current and future leaders.
Historically, times of retail disruption have proven to be fertile ground for growing disruptive new tech companies. The economic turmoil associated with the bursting of the Dot Com Bubble in 2001 and the domination of Walmart across the retail landscape precipitated massive disruption for major retailers. But this unrest led to the emergence of merchandising and supply-chain technology innovation from vendors like i2, Manugistics, ProfitLogic (my former company), Retek and many more vendors who built solutions that helped the rest of the field compete more effectively with the then technology leader in retail, Walmart.
Similarly, The Great Financial Crisis of 2009 created a drag on consumer spending and, subsequently, retailer performance. This occurred in concert with the growth in domination of Amazon in digital retail. The result – the emergence of a whole new category of important technologies built to enable historically brick and mortar brands to more easily get online and capitalize on their omni-channel potential. Current dominant businesses like Shopify, Exact Target (now part of SalesForce.com) and so many more were fueled by the needs of brands and retailers to up their digital game.
Yet the capabilities to optimize performance, in marketing, in merchandising, in customer service, and supply chain are more robust than ever. And innovative entrepreneurs are capitalizing on the many important platform capability improvements at their disposal, including the latest evolution of generative artificial intelligence, to turbo charge their offerings and help consumer-facing businesses grow faster, and more efficiently.
It’s against this promising backdrop that we’ve established our Top 10 Power Players and Rising Stars. While there are innovations throughout the commerce ecosystem, from manufacturing and supply chain to store operations and delivery, we’ve chosen to limit the categories for this first go-round to marketing and merchandising-related tech vendors. These companies, creating value in customer acquisition, assortment planning and loyalty — are impacting the commerce ecosystem in ways Aaron and Deb and I believe will be the most important drivers of differentiated retail performance over this cycle.
To be eligible to be a “Power Player”, a company has to have $10 million or more in annual revenue. To be a “Rising Star”, vendors must have less than $10 million in annual revenue. Based on that simple initial metric, we solicited nominations from our Advisory Board and Selection Committee, a high-profile mix of C-level executives across the brand and retail landscape, to choose the top companies. We then took into consideration the caliber of the founding team – looking for industry experts, often former practitioners in their field, with a compelling vision for the market and recognition as thought leaders by customers and partners, as well as proven traction and a differentiated and sustainable approach to value-creation.
On behalf of Bain & Company, Coresight Research, Bain Capital Ventures, and our tremendous Advisory Board, huge congratulations to each of the 15 winners.
Scott
Scott Friend, BCV
Deb Weinswig, Coresight Research
Aaron Cheris, Bain & Co.
P.S. If you would like to stay up to date with our work or be considered for next year’s list, you can email us here and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.