Seattle real-time inventory firm Augmodo has closed a $37.5m series A funding round to advance its spatial AI technology and improve efficiency and convenience for retailers, brands and consumers.

Retail could be the main beneficiary of spatial AI with the largest physical workforce and physical data problems.

Founded in 2023, Augmodo’s wearable SmartBadges create live 3D store maps powered by a spatial AI assistant, which recommends actions to store staff, solving various problems on retail floors. The technology increases efficiency and makes store workers even more valuable by helping them restock shelves, place orders and improve compliance, saving stores time and money and improving retailer, associate, brand and shopper experiences.

Compared with other offerings, such as robots, SmartBadges are said to collect ten times more frequent data and are 100 times cheaper; set-up speed and simplicity are said to be unrivalled. Hardware is installed in less than 20 minutes and results in 100% passive data collection; shop workers simply walk the aisles as they normally do while the SmartBadge conducts high-frequency scans hundreds of times daily, for the benefit of retailers and brands alike.

“Augmodo was created to transform the physical world of shopping with spatial computing and wearables,” said Ross Finman, CEO of Augmodo. “Initially, we thought it would take many years to show this much progress towards our goal. We’re proud our team achieved our series A milestone faster than we anticipated and, based on these results, we’re able to continue growing our technology across the world’s most innovative retailers.”

Last autumn, the company raised $5.3m in its seed round, and followed up with this series A less than a year later. Their launch customer, Chemist Warehouse, saw such value in its pilot that they invested in the business after experiencing a significant reduction in stockouts, saving inventory and labour costs. The collaboration has also resulted in the development of a fourth-generation version of the wearable SmartBadge, to be unveiled later this year.

“The simplicity of Augmodo allowed us to test and expand rapidly and, beyond us, we see how that’s driving exceptional demand,” said Mark Finocchiaro, managing partner at Chemist Warehouse (www.chemistwarehouse.com.au), Australia’s largest pharmacy retailer with 535 locations internationally. “Augmodo provides preconfigured kits for associates to simply plug in, charge and go. By providing spatial AI assistants to our associates, Augmodo has made their role even more critical; they can instantly capture invaluable shelf information multiple times daily.”

The latest investment was led by TQ Ventures, with participation from existing investors Lerer Hippeau, NewFare, WIN and Interlace, who joined new investor Arena Holdings.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Augmodo as they modernise the largest labour workforce in the world,” said Andrew Marks, co-managing partner at TQ Ventures (tq.vc). “Our strong retail relationships combined with Augmodo’s innovative tech results in a dynamic and strategic partnership that helps retailers and customers provide immediate value today, solving out of stocks, inventory visibility and in-store tasks, while laying the spatial data groundwork for the future of physical retail. As AI moves into the real world, there is a massive opportunity for enterprise use cases with wearables, the biggest being the physical data challenges in retail.”

SpatialView is Augmodo’s analytics platform for retail executives and brand partners, which provides real-time visibility into shelf conditions. Instead of having staff travel endlessly to store locations, or viewing week- or month-old data, businesses can see what’s happening in real time inside any store from a laptop.

“Knowing shelf gaps exist so we can diagnose and solve them is one of the biggest challenges of a supplier,” said Christian Armstrong, chief customer officer of L’Oreal (www.loreal.com) in Australia and New Zealand. “We’ve tried others but they only provide a rear-view snapshot. Augmodo allows us to be armed with 24/7 strategic information so we can be agile to customer and store demands. Augmodo is the future.”

This influx of capital will allow Augmodo (www.augmodo.com) to continue expanding, scaling to hundreds of stores in 2025, with both brands and retailers, and to more than a thousand in the next 18 months, growing retail channels, geographies, speed and scale.