Introduction

Coresight Research is Groceryshop 2026’s research partner. Groceryshop 2026 will take place September 22–24 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada, US. Groceryshop is an annual conference that brings together grocery retailers, CPG brands and technology leaders to discuss the latest business models, advanced technologies and shifting consumer behaviors shaping the future of grocery and everyday retail.

At the event, early-stage retail technology innovators will compete in the Startup Pitch competition across two themed sessions: Technologies Boosting Revenue and Conversion and Technologies Driving Cost Savings and Efficiencies. In this report, we profile a selection of eight competing startups.

Groceryshop 2026 Startup Pitch

Event Format

The Startup Pitch competition will feature two sessions, each featuring up to six startup founders or CEOs, on the Case Studies Stage on the second day of Groceryshop.

Within each session, founders present their solutions and the judges select two startups to advance to a final interview round, posing questions to each finalist. The audience then casts the deciding vote, choosing its preferred finalist to crown the winner of that session. The competition spans two back-to-back sessions, each focused on a different area of disruption represented by the innovator profiles later in this report:

• September 23, 9:00 a.m.–9:40 a.m. PT (local time of the event): Technologies Boosting Revenue and Conversion
• September 23, 9:50 a.m.–10:30 a.m. PT: Technologies Driving Cost Savings and Efficiencies

Judging Panel

A four-person panel judges both sessions:

• Deborah Weinswig, CEO & Founder, Coresight Research
• Manuel Queiroz, Partner, Bright Pixel Capital
• Deepak Jose, VP & Head of Data & Decision Intelligence, Niagara Bottling
• Carey Chou, VP, Data Science & AI Business Solutions, H-E-B

Confirmed Speakers (as of September 2, 2026)

Session 1: Technologies Boosting Revenue and Conversion

• Amir Sarhangi, Founder & CEO, Skyfire
• Kanishka Thakur, Co-Founder & CEO, Nudge
• Oliver Leigh, Co-Founder & CEO, Portal
• Samhita Karnati, Founder & CEO, Shelflife
• Christopher Kong, Co-Founder & CEO, Corvera

Session 2: Technologies Driving Cost Savings and Efficiencies

• Hanson Li, Co-Founder & CEO, Peltier
• Jeremy Pee, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Thri5
• Audrey Djiya, Co-Founder & CEO, Handled

Innovator Profiles

Corvera

Unified data platform powering AI across CPG functions.

Corvera In Detail

Competition Session 1: Technologies Boosting Revenue and Conversion
Presenter at Groceryshop 2026: Christopher Kong, Co-Founder & CEO
Year Founded: 2025
Headquarters: San Francisco, US
Website: https://corvera.ai/

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies increasingly use data from multiple systems across functions such as sales, marketing, pricing, supply chain and inventory management. However, this data often remains distributed across different platforms and formats, making it difficult for teams to access a consistent view of the business and apply that information in AI applications.

Corvera addresses this challenge with a unified data layer that brings together the data CPG brands already have and makes it accessible to AI tools, with governance and access controls built in. The company connects a brand’s existing systems and data sources, consolidates them into a continuously synced source of truth and exposes that unified data to AI agents, applications, dashboards and analytics tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This allows teams across a CPG organization to ask questions about their business data, deploy AI agents for repetitive tasks and build custom reports and tools in natural language without first having to manually integrate data across their underlying systems.

The platform supports use cases spanning category management, pricing and promotion ROI, new product development, demand forecasting, inventory management and marketing mix analysis, enabling teams to analyze category share, promotional elasticity, stockout risk and channel-level marketing returns. Corvera also tracks brand health and sentiment alongside sales data and flags gaps between share of voice and share of shelf at the retailer level. The platform includes access controls and audit logs for queries and actions, as well as enterprise security and compliance features.

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Handled

AI operations platform automating post-order workflows for commerce.

Handled In Detail

Competition Session 2: Technologies Driving Cost Savings and Efficiencies
Presenter at Groceryshop 2026: Audrey Djiya, Co-Founder & CEO
Year Founded: 2023
Headquarters: New York, US
Website: http://www.itshandled.ai/

Brands and the third-party logistics (3PL) providers that fulfill their orders still handle a large share of post-order work manually. When a wholesale purchase order arrives by email or electronic data interchange (EDI), a team member must manually enter it into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, notify the 3PL and separately track the shipment and reconcile the invoice. As order volumes grow, these manual steps can add to the operational workload for brands and their fulfillment partners.

Handled replaces that manual sequence with an automated one. It connects directly to ERPs, 3PLs, co-manufacturers and sales channels and manages the order lifecycle from purchase order intake through shipment tracking to invoicing and payment follow-up, with a team member reviewing and approving each step along the way.

The same connections provide teams with a continuously updated view of inventory across raw materials and finished goods, pulling data from 3PLs and co-manufacturers even when it arrives as spreadsheets or screenshots. When inventory coverage trends toward a stockout, Handled flags the shortfall and creates a purchase order in the ERP for a team member to approve and submit.

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Nudge

Optimizing brand visibility and conversion across AI engines for commerce.

Nudge In Detail

Competition Session 1: Technologies Boosting Revenue and Conversion
Presenter at Groceryshop 2026: Kanishka Thakur, Co-Founder & CEO
Year Founded: 2024
Headquarters: New York, US
Website: https://www.nudgenow.com/

Shopping journeys are increasingly starting on AI platforms rather than traditional search engines or retailer websites, as consumers turn to tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini to research and shop for products. A Coresight Research July 2026 survey of US consumers found that 52.3% of those who had heard of AI/GenAI have used, plan to use or would like to use generative AI to shop. This gradual adoption signals that AI conversations are becoming a durable and growing point of purchase influence, where brands increasingly need to earn visibility or risk going unmentioned.

Nudge addresses this need by helping brands and products get recommended across major AI engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and automatically generating shoppable funnels tailored to the shopping prompts and decision criteria shoppers express. It does this by tracking how AI platforms mention a brand’s products, optimizing product data so AI shopping agents are more likely to surface them and converting that resulting traffic through tailored landing pages. The platform is built around three core capabilities: AI visibility, catalog enrichment and funnels.

AI visibility tracks how AI platforms mention a brand across shopping-intent queries and surfaces citation gaps and product-level visibility, while catalog enrichment optimizes product pages based on how AI shopping agents evaluate and recommend products. Funnels then generate intent-matched landing pages for traffic from AI engines, ads and organic search, using experimentation to compare conversion performance. Nudge connects to tools such as Shopify, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Meta, linking these activities to metrics including funnel revenue, click-through rate lift and how often products are mentioned in AI answers.

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Peltier

Solid-state cooling and modular cold storage for temperature-sensitive products.

Peltier In Detail

Competition Session 2: Technologies Driving Cost Savings and Efficiencies
Presenter at Groceryshop 2026: Hanson Li, Co-Founder & CEO
Year Founded: 2024
Headquarters: San Francisco, US
Website: https://peltierpro.com/

Rapid delivery has moved from a niche convenience option to a mainstream grocery habit, and it is increasingly used for perishable products. The Coresight Research US Online Grocery Survey 2026, based on responses from more than 2,000 consumers, found that 37.9% of online grocery shoppers now do most or nearly all of their digital grocery shopping through rapid delivery and that trust in the channel now extends well beyond shelf-stable goods: over the past year, half of the respondents bought fresh fruit and vegetables (50.1%) and fresh dairy, meat, fish or eggs (49.3%). As more perishable volume moves through rapid-delivery fulfillment windows, grocers need cold-storage and staging capacity that can support faster e-commerce fulfillment and higher peak-hour order volumes.

Peltier addresses this need with a modular, solid-state alternative to the walk-in cooler that has defined cold storage for decades. Its core building block, the Peltier Tote, is a 21-pound, tri-temperature unit that cools without compressors, refrigerants or ice, reaching temperatures as low as -22°C using thermoelectric cooling technology licensed exclusively from Phononic. Totes slot into Peltier Framework racks and carts, allowing grocers and pharma operators to add staging and cold-storage capacity without construction or downtime, while each unit reports real-time temperature and other telemetry data to Peltier Cloud.

The modular design enables Peltier to add up to five times more peak-hour fulfillment slots within the same footprint. Each Tote is monitored and controlled individually, allowing operators to isolate a problem unit rather than discard or quarantine inventory across an entire cold-storage area, and provides per-unit temperature control of ±0.5°C. The same architecture is used for pharmaceutical cold chain applications, where Peltier provides individual temperature monitoring, alerts and risk isolation for temperature-sensitive products.

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Portal

Real-time retail media analytics for CPG brands on retailer sites.

Portal In Detail

Competition Session 1: Technologies Boosting Revenue and Conversion
Presenter at Groceryshop 2026: Oliver Leigh, Co-Founder & CEO
Year Founded: 2023
Headquarters: London, England
Website: https://www.analytics-portals.com/

Retail media is expanding rapidly, but the ability to measure campaign impact remains a challenge for retailers and brands, particularly as media activity spans multiple channels and retail environments. A Coresight Research February 2026 survey of US retail business decision-makers found that 44% have difficulty measuring the overall impact of in-store retail media, highlighting the broader measurement challenges facing the retail media industry.

Portal addresses this measurement gap for digital retail media by giving CPG brands real-time visibility into how consumers behave once they click through a digital ad to a retailer’s website. When a shopper clicks a brand’s ad, Portal tracks the resulting shopping session, including product views, time on page, category exploration, add-to-basket events, basket value and checkout completions. The platform does not require tags, code, retailer approval or integrations, allowing brands to track shopper behavior across multiple retailer sites.

Portal sends real-time conversion signals to advertising platforms and provides brands with full-funnel performance data across retailers. Its analytics layer covers traffic sources, landing-page performance, engagement and conversion metrics, giving brands visibility into shopper behavior from ad click through purchase.

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Shelflife

AI-powered expiration tracking that cuts grocery shrink.

Shelflife in Detail

Competition Session 1: Technologies Boosting Revenue and Conversion
Presenter at Groceryshop 2026: Samhita Karnati, Founder & CEO
Year Founded: 2025
Headquarters: New York, US
Website: https://www.shelflife.ai/

Grocery retailers face growing pressure from in-store inefficiencies, but limited visibility into inventory can make it difficult to address these issues before they affect sales and shrink. A Coresight Research survey of US-based retail decision-makers, conducted in March 2026, found that in-store inefficiencies cost retailers an average of 6.4% of gross sales annually, or $196 billion across the DIY, drugstore, grocery, mass merchandise and warehouse club sectors. For grocery retailers, this challenge is particularly relevant to perishable inventory, where limited visibility into expiration dates and freshness windows can allow products to contribute to shrink before action is taken.shrink before action is taken.

Shelflife addresses this gap by turning expiration dates into a live, machine-readable data signal. Its platform captures expiration data and connects it to a retailer’s existing point-of-sale (POS) and inventory systems without requiring a system replacement. This gives grocery teams batch-level visibility into inventory, tracking stock not just by stock-keeping unit (SKU) but by expiration date, so teams can see exactly what’s expiring, when and how fast it’s selling.

Shelflife’s platform is built to act on this data automatically: it applies markdowns to specific expiration-date batches rather than discounting an entire SKU, protecting margin on fresh stock while moving at-risk inventory before it becomes waste. In addition, an AI optimization layer uses sell-through and expiration data to recommend markdown timing, flag inventory at risk of shrink before it occurs and forecast demand by freshness window.

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Skyfire

Verified identity and payment credentials that let AI agents transact.

Skyfire In Detail

Competition Session 1: Technologies Boosting Revenue and Conversion
Presenter at Groceryshop 2026: Amir Sarhangi, Founder & CEO
Year Founded: 2024
Headquarters: San Francisco, US
Website: https://skyfire.xyz/

Agentic commerce is moving from an experiment to the mainstream faster than most retail infrastructure was built to handle. Coresight Research estimates that the US agentic commerce market, defined as total retail sales mediated (i.e., influenced) by AI-agent experiences that ultimately result in a transaction, will reach approximately $943 billion by 2030. Yet most websites and checkout systems have no reliable way to distinguish a legitimate AI shopping agent from a malicious bot, leaving agents to face blocked logins and failed checkouts as adoption accelerates.

Skyfire provides AI agents with verified identity and payment credentials for use across websites, applications and agent protocols. Its Know Your Agent (KYA) token gives agents programmatic access and login capability to websites, applications and agent protocols with little engineering effort. This is paired with an agentic wallet that lets agents complete purchases using tokenized card transactions and user mandates.

Skyfire’s identity token covers more than 60% of the web, according to the company, powered by infrastructure partners including Akamai, Okta, Cequence and F5, alongside payment networks and rails such as Visa, Mastercard, Discover and USDC. The company also offers a “Buy for Me” feature that enables agents to complete purchases on a user’s behalf through existing merchant checkout flows. Together, these capabilities allow agents to authenticate with services and complete transactions on behalf of users.

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Thri5

AI-powered execution engine closing retail’s efficiency gaps.

Thri5 in Detail

Competition Session 2: Technologies Driving Cost Savings and Efficiencies
Presenter at Groceryshop 2026: Jeremy Pee, Co-Founder & Co-CEO
Year Founded: 2024
Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
Website: https://www.thri5.com/

Retail execution remains one of the industry’s most expensive blind spots. In an April 2025 global survey of retail decision-makers, Coresight Research found that 84% of retailers face challenges managing store operations, most often due to inaccurate demand forecasting, ineffective inventory management and out-of-stocks. A related Coresight survey of retailers, conducted in March 2026, found that US retailers lose an average of 6.4% of gross sales to in-store inefficiencies.

Thri5 addresses these operational challenges by using retailers’ existing data and systems to create a closed loop for identifying and acting on execution issues. Its AI-powered “System of Actions” monitors signals such as sales, margin, inventory and availability across stores, distribution centers and headquarters, scores each exception by value, confidence, urgency and root-cause likelihood, and assigns it to the right owner and workflow. The platform integrates with a retailer’s existing technology and workforce tools without requiring retailers to replace their existing systems and keeps a human in the loop through governed thresholds and role-based approvals.

Once an issue is identified, Thri5 sequences and routes the response across teams and AI agents, coordinating dependencies such as resolving a distribution center issue before taking store-level action, and uses frontline and HQ copilots to guide the next best action and automate time-consuming steps. On the sales side, the platform detects specific lost-sales triggers such as out-of-stocks, phantom inventory, promotion misses and underperforming new items, then routes actions to recover revenue at the store and SKU level. The platform is built to run continuously rather than on a scheduled basis, and is designed to work across retail categories, including grocery.