Californian in-location experience firm Raydiant has acquired Perch, a New York-based digital shopper marketing platform for in-store product engagement and sales.

Integrated into the Raydiant Shop offering, this acquisition ushers in a contextual physical and digital retail experience platform. Combined with Raydiant AI and its customer experience platform, Perch’s technology should be able to understand and analyse how shoppers interact with in-store products.

“As a current Perch customer, we couldn’t be more excited about Raydiant’s acquisition,” said Kenny Endermuhle, category experience design manager at Nestlé Purina. “It accelerates meaningful AI and data capabilities, and enables us to provide our retail partners next-generation omnichannel shopper experiences that will help drive the category forward.”

A specialist in digital shelf, lift-and-learn, and computer vision technologies, Perch was responsible for the lift-and-learn deployments to some top retail brands, including Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé Purina, Unilever, Invisalign and Coty. Categories using this technology, including those in beauty, fragrance, grocery, electronics and apparel, have even seen an average sales lift of 87%.

“To thrive in the world of brick and mortar, companies must move beyond traditional physical and digital signage,” said Raydiant CEO Bobby Marhamat. “Companies need to be bold and unapologetic when it comes to creating in-store experiences for their customers. But they also need data and insights to develop those experiences. This acquisition will enable us to equip brick-and-mortar retailers with the best tools to generate the right insights to deliver the most personalised in-store content. We need to rapidly evolve in order to create the most engaging customer experiences and Raydiant’s acquisition of Perch marks a huge turning point for the retail industry.”

Trevor Sumner, formerly CEO of Perch and Raydiant’s new head of AI and innovation, added: “No industry personifies the need to bridge physical and digital experiences more than the $4tn brick-and-mortar retail industry. Raydiant will be the first company to offer advanced AI and analytics for unique in-store experiences. They’ll be able to tailor messaging based on demographics and what products shoppers physically interact with. Raydiant will unite the best of physical and digital shopping by providing AI insights into the science of in-store conversion. This acquisition is going to fundamentally change the retail landscape.”

This acquisition should provide a deeper understanding of shopper behaviour and product engagement insights. These include engaged viewer counts with demographic segmentation, dwell times and sentiment analysis, as well as product conversion metrics such as screen pickup and sales conversion ratios, and merchandising insights such as planogram distribution and messaging conversion.

Founded in 2017, Raydiant is headquartered in San Francisco, and has raised a total of $50m from 8VC, Atomic Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Mark Wahlberg Investments, Bloomberg Beta, Gaingels, Illuminate Ventures, Transmedia Capital and Ron Conway.