Warburg Pincus leads $64m round for Singapore's Trax

Trax closed its previous funding round as recently as February, when Investec Bank led a $19.5 million investment at a valuation of nearly $250 million. The company has now raised more than $160 million to date, and Warburg Pincus has become its largest institutional shareholder. Several existing investors also re-upped in the round.

The Trax system begins with sales reps using their smart phones to photograph store shelves and then uploading the images to a cloud-based platform. Trax’s image recognition and computer vision algorithms identify products – and how they are presented – and turn the data into actionable information. Within minutes, this information is relayed to customers, enabling them to assess whether a certain product would sell better if, for example, it were moved three shelves over.

In addition to providing real-time reports on changes to be made to product positioning in stores, Trax works with Nielsen to deliver continues retail performance analysis based on shelf and point of sale data. The company has more than 175 clients in 50 countries, including Coca-Cola, AB InBev, Nestle, Henkel, and PepsiCo. Joel Bar-El, CEO of Trax, previously told AVCJ that global consumer brands spend more than $70 billion a year on shelf space and related promotions.

“Trax has the potential to become the one stop ‘go to’ solution for all retail info – essentially the ‘Bloomberg of Retail.’ Machine learning underpins Trax’ computer vision technology which is an important area of focus for Warburg Pincus and we look forward to working with Joel and the Trax team to further expand its market-leading offerings,” said Jeffrey Perlman, managing director and head of Southeast Asia at Warburg Pincus, in a statement.

Trax is Singapore-headquartered part by chance and part by design. Having recently sold his previous start-up, Bar-El met the two people who would become his co-founders in the city in 2010. They came from retail and recognized the value of a solution that could deliver information regarding on-shelf performance. His technology experience meant this idea could be put into practice.

Each founder contributed about $100,000 in seed capital, and within two months of establishing the company, a further $500,000 was raised at a valuation of $1.5 million. Singapore-based hedge fund Broad Peak contributed $15 million in 2014 and then committed $50 million last year at a valuation of about $220 million.

Trax got its break early on by establishing a partnership with Procter & Gamble, which used the technology with its brands, prompting others to do the same. The company is looking at ways to bring the image recognition engine from the cloud and into the device itself. It is estimated that within two years standard smart phones will be powerful enough to support the infrastructure internally, and once that happens Trax can go directly to the consumer.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Expansion
• Consumer
• Technology
• Singapore
• Warburg Pincus Asia
• Growth capital