Commerce · Chicago
Shelfwise
Demand forecasting for grocers with thin margins.
- Stage
- Series A
- Founded
- Founded 2020
- First invested
- We invested 2021
- Team
- 51 people
- Board
- Board seat
- Total raised
- $18M
- Current stage
- Series A
- Team
- 51
- Founded
- 2020
What they build
The product, in plain terms
Shelfwise builds demand forecasting for grocers with thin margins. The company started in Chicago in 2020. We backed it at seed and have worked with the team through Series A.
- 01
A merchant-facing product that pays for itself inside a quarter or gets churned.
- 02
Data pulled from the systems merchants already run, so onboarding is a connection rather than a migration.
- 03
Pricing tied to an outcome the merchant can see in their own numbers.
Where it stands
Numbers the team watches
Reported by the company at its most recent board meeting. We publish what founders are comfortable publishing and nothing more.
- Gross merchandise value
- $7M
- Net revenue retention
- 94%
- Time to first value
- 2 weeks
Why we invested
The note from the first meeting
“We met Shelfwise in 2021, back when the category was crowded at the top and thin where the margins actually were. They were building the boring half of the product first, which almost nobody does, and it made the rest of the roadmap credible.”
- Rebuilt pricing twice and doubled contract value both times.
- Opened a second market within a year of its seed round.
- Reached default-alive economics before raising a priced round.
Founders
Who is building it
Both founders were in the room the day we wrote the check, and both still run the company.
Esi Mensah
Co-founder and CEO
Started out consulting for the buyers this product now serves.
Dmitri Petrenko
Co-founder and CTO
Wrote the migration tooling twice, once badly, and still talks about the first one.
Timeline
How it has gone
The version we would give another investor, including the years where nothing looked like progress.
- 2020
Founded
Esi Mensah and Dmitri Petrenko start Shelfwise in Chicago around a single wedge: demand forecasting for grocers with thin margins.
- 2021
We invested
We wrote the seed check and took a board seat. Marcus Webb has worked with the team ever since.
- 2022
Paid customers
Contracts replaced pilots, and the company stopped selling a roadmap and started selling a product.
- 2023
Series A round
Raised at $110M, led by an investor we introduced during diligence. We took our full pro rata.
- 2026
Where it stands
51 people, selling in more markets than it started in, still run by the two people who wrote the first version.
Alongside us
Co-investors
We share rounds with people we would want on our own cap table.
- Boldstart
- Lux Capital
- Matrix
- Uncork Capital
Working here
Open roles
Shelfwise is hiring in these areas. Mention us and the note gets to the founders directly.
- Integrations
- Category management
- Merchant success
Others we back in Commerce
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