Walk into a grocery store and notice where real decisions get made. Not on a phone. Not in a slide deck. They happen under fluorescent lights, five feet from the shelf, with a cart wheel squeaking and a clock ticking in someone’s head. Looma lives exactly there, and that is the whole point. Founded Jan 2015 and HQ in Durham, NC, Looma built an enterprise-grade in-store retail media platform that does not shout ads. It tells stories, teaches shoppers, and sharpens the moment of choice. Cole Johnson saw that gap early, long before retail media became a buzzword, and decided the shelf itself deserved a voice.
Cole Johnson’s path to Looma did not start in CPG or media buys. It started in Kolkata with Freedom Code, a social enterprise that shaped how he thinks about narrative, purpose, and people. A Chancellor’s Carolina Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Cole Johnson carried that worldview into retail, pairing storytelling with infrastructure. The result is a network that scaled from ~800 screens in 2023 to 7,000+ screens across 1,100 stores today, reaching 27M shoppers every month inside Kroger, BJ’s Wholesale Club, H-E-B, Harris Teeter, Lowes Foods, and Schnucks.
Looma announced a $10M Series B led by Staley Capital, paired with a $3M credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Herb Kleinberger, Operating Advisor at Staley Capital and a retail lifer who knows where margin hides, joined the board as part of the raise. Total capital now stands at $30M, following earlier backing from Cofounders Capital, YETI Capital, family offices, and 40+ angels who understand that screens only matter when they earn their square footage.
What makes Looma hum is the architecture. Atmospheric screens set tone and direction. High-value space screens sit with the product and do the explaining. In-aisle interactives solve real problems with recommendations, recipes, and context. All of it runs on a cloud CMS with 99%+ uptime, supported by a national field ops team and full-funnel analytics tracking 25+ KPIs. Content flows through Relay, a global creator network built for point-of-decision storytelling, not recycled TV spots.
The numbers land because the design is honest. Brands like General Mills, P&G, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, and Diageo see ~4x incremental ROAS. A multi-year Kroger pilot across 50 stores delivered category growth, cleaner end caps, a 98% customer satisfaction score, and alcohol brands posting 2–4x iROAS. That momentum is now scaling across nearly 600 Kroger wine and spirits departments, powered by Cole Johnson, Ned Brown, Chris Stephens, Andy Jensen, and Liz Adams, with guidance from Margot Fooshee, Tom Long, and Fred Morganthall, pushing Looma deeper into the store and further into what retail media is quietly becoming.
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