Trax secures US$100M in Series D to become Singapore’s second unicorn

Trax, a provider of computer vision and analytics solutions for retail industry, announced today it has closed US$100 million in Series D round of investment, led by HOPU Investments, a leading alternative asset manager in Asia.

With this round, Singapore-based Trax has become the second-only startup from Singapore after ride-hailing giant Grab to enter the coveted Unicorn club.

The company will use the fresh money for global expansion and to accelerate mass-market deployment of its retail solutions.

Trax provides in-store execution solutions, market measurement and analytics services for CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands and retailers by combining its proprietary fine-grained image recognition and machine learning with an IoT platform to turn photos of retail shelves into granular, actionable shelf and store-level insights.  The company claims to have partnered with world’s top brands and retailers.

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“Trax will only become more important as consumer goods manufacturers and retailers increase their usage of in-store data analytics. Trax is clearly becoming an essential component in the decision making and execution processes of major players within retail,” said HOPU’s Jacqueline Zhang.

Dror Feldheim, Chief Commercial Officer and Co-founder of Trax, said: “Trax has established an ecosystem anchored with deep CPG and retail industry collaboration and diverse partnerships. Our investment from HOPU will accelerate the development of our footprint in China and globally, and further position our market-ready retailer solutions to be deployed at scale.”

“We are convinced that Trax can grow rapidly in China’s consumer landscape. China’s retail market has digitalized rapidly, in both online and new offline retail concepts. Yet the vast majority of China’s brick and mortar stores remain underserved in store management, assortment and optimization. Trax’s global leading technology and CPG experience, coupled with its entrepreneurial management team, should allow it to quickly capture this white space,” said HOPU’s Gunther Hamm.

To date, Trax has raised over US$350 million in equity financing and operates in over 50 countries with more than 175 client engagements. This includes a US$64 million funding round led by an affiliate of Warburg Pincus (its largest shareholder) in 2017. It also counts Boyu Capital, Investec and GIC among its existing investors.