In retail, the margin between instinct and insight can make or break the quarter. And Intelo.ai just raised $2M to make sure that margin disappears entirely. This New York-based startup is doing what most “AI in retail” pitches only pretend to do, creating Collaborative Intelligence that actually collaborates. Not dashboards, not static models, but real AI agents that partner with merchandisers and planners to reason, recommend, and automate. Think of it as having a digital counterpart that doesn’t sleep, argue, or misread the forecast.
Co-Founders & Co-CEOs Roopesh Nair and Jeffrey Fish didn’t build Intelo.ai out of theory. They built it out of frustration. Nair, the former President & CEO of Symphony Talent, saw firsthand how planning cycles stayed stuck in spreadsheet purgatory. Fish, a longtime tech exec in retail software, knew the inefficiency wasn’t from a lack of data, it was from a lack of intelligence that could think with the people making decisions. Together, they set out to solve the oldest problem in retail: too much noise, not enough signal.
Illuminate Ventures saw that signal loud and clear, leading the $2M seed round announced Oct 15, 2025. Managing Partner Cindy Padnos doesn’t miss often, and this investment shows she’s still got the best aim in the room. The capital will power product expansion, a 20-person hiring sprint across engineering, data science, and sales, and a sharper go-to-market push aimed squarely at midmarket and enterprise retailers.
Intelo.ai’s platform is built like it means it, AI agents powered by reinforcement learning, running cloud-native microservices on AWS, integrating with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, JIRA, Gainsight, and major ERP systems. Their pilot customers have already cut manual planning cycle times by up to 95%. That’s not evolution; that’s a velocity adjustment.
Next up, a new forecasting agent in Q1 ’26 and pricing/markdown optimization agents by mid-’26. SOC2 Type II compliance is in progress, GDPR & CCPA boxes checked, patents filed for AI-driven workflows. It’s not just smart tech, it’s enterprise-grade confidence wrapped in real-world pragmatism.
What’s striking here isn’t just the tech, it’s the shift. Retail planning has been reactive for decades. Intelo.ai’s making it proactive. When AI stops being a tool and starts being a teammate, the math changes. The industry won’t just plan differently, it’ll think differently.
