Celect, a market leader in predictive analytics and inventory optimization for retailers, announced today that it has closed $10M in Series B funding. Led by Activant Capital with participation from Fung Capital and August Capital, the funding will be used to extend momentum built in 2016 after closing the year with 2.5x revenue growth. In addition, Celect will accelerate product development to support growing customer demand and aggressively cultivating sales pipeline to seize on the current market opportunity.

Launched in 2013 with an MIT technology breakthrough in machine learning, Celect helps retailers optimize omnichannel inventory portfolios in stores, online, and across their supply chain. With increasing pressures on the retail industry to perform, Celect is providing retailers a way to significantly boost in-store revenues and inventory turns across channels.

"For nearly twenty years our industry has been paying lip service to the notion of injecting the 'art' of merchandising with more science," said Bryan Eshelman, COO of Aldo Group. "We have now reached a tipping point with consumers expecting everything available everywhere all the time. Lip service is no longer an option - meeting this expectation while simultaneously reducing inventory is simply impossible without advanced analytics."

Historically, most merchandising decisions are made using simple spreadsheets and gut instinct, which leaves little room for optimization and in turn limits growth opportunities. With Celect, retailers now have a more precise and granular way to understand how customers choose between products, and how products interact with each other. This unprecedented insight is surfacing significant opportunities for optimization that would otherwise have gone undiscovered.

"Celect's growth confirms that omnichannel retailers are ready to embrace data-driven decision support solutions," said Steve Sarracino, Founder and Partner at Activant Capital. "Inventory optimization across the supply chain is on the top of every retail executive's list of priorities. We are excited to further our relationship with the Celect team as they help retailers solve this critical challenge."

"Every retailer we work with is making it a top priority to bring data and analytics into their merchandising, planning and allocation decision making," said John Andrews, CEO at Celect. "With this funding, we will be able to support our growing list of customers and expand the scope of product offerings moving through 2017."

About Celect

Celect is a cloud-based, predictive analytics SaaS platform that helps retailers optimize their overall inventory portfolios in stores and across the supply chain, resulting in double-digit percentage revenue increases through optimized assortments and fulfillment. This groundbreaking advance in machine learning and optimization allows retailers to understand how an individual customer shopping in store or online chooses from an assortment of products, revealing true demand. The technology builds on a fundamental advance in customer choice modeling called by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory one of the 50 greatest innovations it has ever produced.