Nexite raises $67M for its new approach to tagging and tracking merchandise in physical stores

But physical retail is far from disappearing altogether, and today a company that’s built a solution very specifically targeted at improving data around in-person merchandise sales is announcing a big round of funding as it moves ahead on some major rollouts it has inked with retailers — a sign of how things are changing, and the appetite that the market has for that.Nexite, which has developed a radio-powered tagging system and corresponding data platform to read and parse information related to those tagged items, has raised $67 million in a Series C round of funding, and $100 million overall, money that it plans to use both for R&D as well as to roll out services to its first customers.“We solve our customer’s biggest pain point, which is a lack of real-time data in physical stores,” Anat Shakedd, the CEO who co-founded the Tel Aviv-based company with her husband Lior, said in an interview. Digital transformation has definitely become a catchphrase of the day, but that doesn’t mean that every company is ready to go through with it, or will be successful in actually implementing it.In any case, there are also a lot of possibilities of applying the tech that Nexite has built to a much wider range of IoT and other use cases — any scenarios where it’s now seen as useful to be able to track the movement and operation of of previously “unconnected” things.“We went to retail first because they already tag everything, with 90% of items in categories like apparel already using security tags, so we didn’t need to educate them as much,” Shakedd said.