Two retail and technology veterans with roots at Waterloo Engineering are using the lessons they learned to help retailers ensure corporate plans are efficiently executed at the store level.
Jeremy Pee (BASc ’99, mechanical engineering) and Herman Paek (BASc ’99, electrical engineering) launched Thri5 in 2024 after experiencing frustration in their careers with the costly disconnect between head office and individual stores.
The Toronto-based company provides an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that helps turn plans into measurable sales, profit and inventory improvements.
“Retailers don’t have a shortage of data, systems or plans,” Pee, co-founder and CEO, said in a media release today. “The challenge is translating all of that intelligence into the right action across every store.
“AI gives us a fundamentally different way to connect what the business knows with what teams actually do — continuously identifying where the biggest opportunities are, focusing teams on what matters most and learning from the results.”
In a recent pilot with retailer Wild Fork Foods, the company’s platform boosted sales by three per cent and profit by 3.6 per cent, while also improving inventory accuracy over a period of nine weeks.
On the heels of that successful rollout, Thri5 announced US $5.4 million in seed funding to expand its engineering, product and commercial teams while roughly doubling its 10-person workforce over the next year.
Pee and Paek, co-founder and COO, previously worked together to found and scale Digital Loblaw, the digital business of Canada’s largest grocery and pharmacy retailer, into a multi-billion-dollar operation.