Canadian retail tech company Thri5 has secured C$5.4m ($3.9m) in seed funding after a pilot and later rollout with US-based Wild Fork Foods.
The round was co-led by Whitecap Venture Partners and Mistral Venture Partners, with participation from MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, N49P and a group of retail and technology veterans.
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Thri5 said it will use the funding to grow its engineering, product and commercial teams and to expand its go-to-market activity with enterprise retailers globally.
The company said the funding follows a nine-week pilot with Wild Fork Foods, during which Thri5 reported a 3% lift in sales, a 3.6% increase in profit and a 2.0 percentage point improvement in inventory accuracy.
Following those results, Wild Fork has rolled out Thri5 across its store network in the US and Canada.
Thri5 describes its product as an AI-native execution layer that sits above a retailer’s existing technology stack and is intended to turn planning and forecasting data into action at store level without requiring replacement of core systems.
The company said its platform reads signals across a retailer’s data and systems, identifies and ranks opportunities, and manages execution across teams, systems and AI agents.
Thri5 said “the result is a persistent gap between what retailers plan and what actually happens in stores. Across the many sources of execution leakage” and added that it “estimates the total value at stake can represent 10%-20% of sales”.
The company was founded in Toronto, Canada, by Herman Paek and CEO Jeremy Pee.
Before starting Thri5, Pee and Paek co-founded Loblaw Digital, where they built the digital arm of the Canadian grocery and pharmacy retailer into an operation spanning online grocery, digital pharmacy and apparel.
The duo previously co-founded Loblaw Digital, expanding the Canadian grocery and pharmacy retailer’s digital arm into an operation spanning online grocery, digital pharmacy and apparel.
Pee said: “Retailers don’t have a shortage of data, systems or plans. 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.”
