Why I invested in Vera

Retail brands fly blind. They know revenue per store, foot traffic, conversion rate. They don’t know why a customer walked out without buying — what the associate said, what the customer asked, where the pitch broke. Vera turns the in-store conversation into structured insight.

Why I backed it

Untapped data layer. This is one of the largest unmonitored data surfaces in retail. Hours of customer conversations every day, none of it captured. Vera is doing for in-store what Gong did for sales calls — and the analogy holds.

AI as gravity field, prompts as masses. This is a tier-1 use of AI — not “transcribe the meeting”, but “tell me what conversion-killing behavior the team doesn’t know it has”. The model proposes; the operator decides what to fix.

Founders who shipped before raising. Small round ($600K seed), real customers, narrow focus. They aren’t pretending to be the next Salesforce — they’re picking a wedge and going deep.

The bet

Brick-and-mortar retail still does ~85% of US consumer spend and a higher share in LatAm. Whoever turns the in-store conversation into structured signal becomes infrastructure. Early and small, but the wedge is clean.