Boyu leads $125m round for Singapore's Trax

DC Thomson, a media company best known for publishing The Beano, the longest-running children’s comic magazine in the UK, also took part. Trax has now raised approximately $235 million in total. Part of the proceeds of the latest round will be used to take out some early investors’ shares.

The company received $65 million from Singapore-based hedge fund Broad Peak across two rounds in 2015 and 2016. Last year, Investec Bank committed $19.5 million and then Warburg Pincus led a $64 million round, becoming the largest institutional shareholder.

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 users, enabling them to assess whether a certain product would sell better if, for example, it was 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. Pilot projects are also underway with several global retailers aimed at providing continuous shelf tracking with wireless internet-of-things (IoT) cameras.

The company has more than 175 clients in 50 countries, including Coca-Cola, AB InBev, Nestle, Henkel, and PepsiCo. It plans to use the latest funding for global expansion and mass-market deployment of its retail solutions. Greater China – where the use of digital retail solutions is still in its early stages – is a key area for expansion and Boyu’s network is expected to help in this respect.

"The investment in Trax is driven by our conviction in the compelling value proposition of new technology solutions that enable digitalization of brick and mortar retail. We are impressed by the wide recognition of Trax's cloud-based one-stop-shop solutions by the world's largest CPG companies and retailers,” Joey Chen, a managing director at Boyu, said in a statement.

Joel Bar-El, CEO of Trax, met the two people who would become his co-founders in Singapore in 2010. They were from retail and recognized the value of a solution that could deliver information regarding on-shelf performance. Bar-El’s technology experience meant this idea could be put into practice. 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.

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