Nomi Raises $10M to Expand Retail Analytics 

As in-store analytics gain momentum, Nomi, a New York-based marketing optimization platform founded by Salesforce alumni, has raised $10 million to finance its jump beyond the borders of apparel into other areas like automotive, movie theaters, amusement parks and even restaurant chains.

While Web-based retailers are already using a number of metrics to determine who their customers are and what they’re looking for, their brick and mortar counterparts are often in the dark. But Nomi hopes to change that.

Nomi’s core function involves tracking how long shoppers are in a store, what type of mobile devices they’re using, and which shoppers that are just passing by actually walk into the store. Nomi’s CEO and co-founder Marc Ferrentino notes that these tools are in no way exclusive to retail, which help drove the decision to expand.

Accel Partners led the Series A round, with help from First Round Capital, Greycroft Partners and Forerunner Ventures. The $10 million will be added to the $3 million Series A investment that these organizations, along with SV Angel, invested earlier this year.

In the past nine months, the company has already done some expanding, adding 31 employees to its previous total of four. With the new funding, the company will add to its account management and deployment teams. Once that is taken care of, product and engineering teams can also expect to see some growth.

Even with the funding announcement, however, Nomi won’t go without facing a number of challenges. Its closest competitor, Euclid, raised $17.3 million in Series B funding in February, while retail intelligence company Quri is also has a $10 million round underway for its in-store analytics offering.

Still, Accel and others say they have a good reason to back Nomi in the face of competition. Jake Flomenberg, a venture capitalist at Accel, was impressed by how well the company has already done. “In a single year, Nomi signed more clients than every other competitor combined,” he claims.

Although Ferrentino says that the company has already signed a number of “pretty substantial” retailers and restaurant chains, he declined to name any of Nomi’s new customers.