Thri5 Raises US$5.4M to Build the AI Execution Layer for Retail

TORONTO — September 21, 2026 — Thri5, the AI execution layer for retail, today announced US$5.4 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Whitecap Venture Partners and Mistral Venture Partners, with participation from MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF), N49P and a group of retail and technology veterans.

Thri5 was founded by Jeremy Pee, Co-Founder and CEO, and Herman Paek, Co-Founder and COO, two experienced operators who previously worked together to found and scale Loblaw Digital. The two built the digital business of Canada’s largest grocery and pharmacy retailer from the ground up into a multi-billion-dollar operation spanning online grocery, digital pharmacy and apparel.

Since working together at Loblaw, Pee and Paek went on to senior leadership roles in retail and technology. Pee, whose retail career spans more than 20 years across merchandising, strategy, digital and technology, most recently served as Chief Digital and Technology Officer of Marks & Spencer in the UK. Paek most recently served as CEO and General Manager of Kijiji Canada. They reunited to build Thri5 around a problem they had repeatedly encountered as operators: the gap between what organizations know and plan centrally and what actually gets executed on the front line.

“Jeremy and Herman have the combination we look for: deep domain expertise, proven operating experience and a history of building successfully together. They’ve experienced this problem firsthand and are now applying that experience to an enormous opportunity.”

Melissa Belbeck, Whitecap Venture Partners

As retailers move from experimenting with AI to demanding measurable business results, Thri5 has demonstrated that AI can improve execution and deliver meaningful impact in stores. In a nine-week pilot with Wild Fork Foods, Thri5 delivered a 3.0% increase in sales, 3.6% improvement in profit and 2.0 percentage point improvement in inventory accuracy. The results led Wild Fork to deploy Thri5 across its store network in the United States and Canada.

“What I look for in any new tool is whether it connects what’s happening on the floor with what we plan centrally — and whether the team can actually trust the data. Thri5 does both. Adoption was fast because it told operators what mattered each day, not just what to look at.”

Radek Mazurkiewicz, COO of Wild Fork Foods

Retailers have invested billions in systems for planning, forecasting and analytics. Yet translating those plans and insights into consistent action across hundreds or thousands of locations and operators remains difficult. Opportunities get buried across dashboards and reports, competing priorities overwhelm teams, and execution still relies heavily on emails, spreadsheets and manual coordination — with little visibility into whether actions were actually completed or delivered the intended result.

The result is a persistent gap between what retailers plan and what actually happens in stores. Across the many sources of execution leakage, Thri5 estimates the total value at stake can represent 10–20% of sales.

Thri5 is built as an AI-native execution layer that develops context across the enterprise — understanding what is happening across the business, how work gets done and where value is being lost. It continuously interprets signals across a retailer’s data and systems, identifies and prioritizes the highest-value opportunities, and connects head office priorities with field and store execution, orchestrating action across teams, systems and AI agents. As work is completed, Thri5 learns from outcomes, building deeper operational context and improving how the organization executes over time. Because it sits above retailers’ existing technology stack, Thri5 can coordinate execution across functions without requiring them to replace or migrate their core systems.

“Retailers don’t have a shortage of data, systems or plans. The challenge is translating all of that intelligence into the right action across every store. AI gives us a fundamentally different way to connect what the business knows with what teams actually do — continuously identifying where the biggest opportunities are, focusing teams on what matters most and learning from the results.”

Jeremy Pee, Co-Founder and CEO of Thri5

Thri5 sees this as the emergence of a new layer in the enterprise technology stack: a system of action that complements the systems retailers already use to plan and operate their businesses.

“AI’s biggest enterprise opportunity isn’t generating more insights — it’s turning intelligence into action. Thri5 is building the layer that makes that possible in retail. We believe the shift from systems of insight to systems of action represents an important new category of enterprise software.”

Raif Barbaros, Mistral Venture Partners

With the new capital, Thri5 plans to expand its engineering, product and commercial teams and accelerate its go-to-market efforts with enterprise retailers globally.