Two ex-Loblaw Digital alumni have raised fresh funding to scale their AI retail platform that helps align business strategy with execution.
The news: Thri5, which is developing an AI execution layer for retail business, says it has raised $5.4 million USD ($7.5 million CAD) in seed funding, with plans to use the capital to roughly double its 10-person team over the next year, as well as accelerate its go-to-market strategy. Whitecap Venture Partners, Mistral Ventures, the MaRS Accelerator Fund, N49P, Amar Varma, and Farhan Thawar, as well as several undisclosed individual investors, contributed to the fund.
From the source: Founded in 2024, Thri5 is led by co-founder and CEO Jeremy Pee and co-founder and COO Herman Paek. Both Pee and Paek boast long careers in retail and tech, where they collaborated to build Loblaw’s digital platform in the 2010s. Most recently, Pee served as chief digital and technology officer at Marks & Spencer, a UK clothing retailer, while Paek served as the CEO of Kijiji Canada.
The context: Thri5’s platform developed out of the frustration both founders experienced during their stints in retail operations: that there is a gap between businesses’ central strategy and the ground-level execution of that strategy. It claims its platform can bridge the two ends of an operation, streamlining execution across the value chain by using agentic AI to understand how work gets done, identify where value is being lost, and help teams take action. The company has already completed a nine-week pilot project with Wild Fork Foods, where it reported delivering an increase in sales of three percent. Based on those results, Thri5 is moving toward a broader rollout for enterprise retailers in North America and Europe.
Final thought: Thri5 is doing what many AI-native startups are doing: using AI to automate and streamline traditionally manual aspects of software-as-a-service applications. Like others in the AI space, it is having no issues attracting investment. But whether that is due to the technology’s promise, or the star power of two well-versed founders, is up to interpretation. For Melissa Belbeck of Whitecap Ventures, it seems to be more of the latter. In a statement, Belbeck said it was Pee and Paek who attracted the VC to the round, adding that they had a combination of “deep domain expertise, proven operating experience, and a history of building successfully together.”
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Eduardo Soares.