An AI first for Vestiaire Collective as Duvo bags more funding: last week's most read retail technology articles
Check out our most clicked retail technology articles from last week, including Morrisons, Logile, Miracly, Frasers Group, Asda, The Very Group, Made With Intent, VoCoVo, Cotswold Outdoor Group, Wayfair, Zalando, gorjana, Walmart, Wing, Panda Retail, Deliveroo, and the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards.
Morrisons taps Logile to enhance store planning across supermarket, convenience, logistics sites
Morrisons has selected Logile as it looks to enhance store workload planning across the UK grocery retailer’s business. The agreement covers its supermarket and convenience store estate alongside its logistics network.
Morrisons is implementing Logile software in a bid to simplify central planning, replacing time-consuming manual spreadsheets with optimised operational data and intelligence. By delivering clearer visibility into store workload requirements, it says that central operations can provide accurate, reliable insight across the estate, allowing teams to focus on better supporting store operations.
“Getting colleagues where customers need them most is the heart of what we do, and at our scale you need a reliable, shared foundation to get that right,” says Alex Rose, Head of Productivity at Morrisons. “A large supermarket and a local convenience store operate differently so our planning has to flex to those local needs while keeping central support consistent. When our store managers have plans they can depend on, they spend less time managing admin and more time supporting their colleagues and serving customers.”
John Lewis, Asda, Morrisons, H&M, Dunelm, and Waitrose among 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards finalists
We're hugely pleased to present the finalists and shortlists for the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards, sponsored by 3D Cloud, Business France, and Retail Technology Show 2027. We received a record number of entries this year and many fantastic examples of technology excellence driving transformative change across the global retail sector
Congratulations to all those who made it through the initial submission process! It’s now over to our star studded judging panel who will decide the winners to be announced at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London.
The event will be held on Wednesday, 4th November and consist of a drinks reception, three course meal, awards ceremony presided over by award winning stand-up comedian, presenter, actor and broadcaster, Aurie Styla, and after party until 1am.
Click here to book your place at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, 4th November.
AI powered marketing platform Miracly publicly launches with $2 million pre-seed funding round
Miracly, a GEO and AI operating system for marketing teams and agencies developed by The Wild Ventures, the company behind Scandinavian home decor brand Wild Palace, has announced a $2 million pre-seed round led by Beenext Ventures and Lotus alongside a Swedish family office, with existing investors including Stefan Lindeberg, Founder at VC firm Creandum; Alex Bouaziz, Founder and CEO at Deel; Thomas Ekman, Founder at 6GAI and former CEO at Axel Johnson publ, Dustin and Tele2; Hedda Baverud Olsson, Founder and CEO at Lassie, and Parham Benisi, Partner at Pophouse.
The company publicly launched last week. Pre-launch it has landed customers including Dreams, Acclime, Pixi Beauty, Andy Okay and Duellix.
“We’re seeing an incredible demand for Miracly’s AI marketing platform. Companies all over the world are impacted by decreasing organic traffic from Google and increasing cost of performance marketing,” says Bjorn Bergstrom, Co-founder at Miracly.
“We started out with GEO analytics and AI content generation, but are rapidly becoming a holistic AI marketing platform based on the demand and opportunity we’re seeing in the market. Marketing and agency teams are becoming hybrid marketing and tech organisations and need to develop incredibly quickly to keep up with the changes. Miracly is here to guide them through this shift into an AI first era with completely customised recommendations and agentic flows.”
Vestiaire Collective becomes first luxury resale platform to standardise new listing photos with AI
Photoroom has published results from its work with Vestiaire Collective, a platform for pre-loved luxury fashion. Vestiaire Collective split its new listings into two random groups. One had its main photo edited by Photoroom, the other by the photo clipping tool Vestiaire Collective built in-house years ago. Listings in the Photoroom group sold at a 5% higher rate of liquidity. Their product pages drew 3 to 7% more unique views, with bags and shoes gaining the most.
Vestiaire Collective says it chose Photoroom after testing several generative AI tools and finding that every one of them changed the items. A photo that changes the item breaks two things on a resale platform. Vestiaire Collective authenticates a share of items from their photos alone, checking labels, stitching and how light falls on the material. Buyers can also return anything that turns out to be fake or has a fault the seller didn't disclose. Smooth out a scuff or redraw a logo and both are at risk.
Photoroom's own testing points the same way. In a benchmark of 4,250 AI generated images across 850 real products, the best AI image editing models on the market passed a full product fidelity check only 29% of the time. 63% of UK consumers say inconsistent product images or branding make a marketplace less trustworthy, according to Photoroom's State of GenAI in Marketplaces 2026 report.
Tomáš Čupr bags $32 million for Duvo, an AI platform born from challenges he encountered while building Rohlik
Duvo, an automation platform that gives teams an AI workforce for their day-to-day operations, has announced a $32 million Series A led by Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, Northzone and Credo Ventures. The round brings its total funding to $48 million and will fund its expansion, starting with retailers and CPG companies.
Michael Green is also joining from Databricks as Senior Vice President, Go-to-Market. He previously served as a Senior Vice President at Salesforce. Spencer Insolia recently came onboard as Managing Director, US. He was previously President at Kmart and a Managing Director at Accenture. Christoph Schwaiger, former CEO at Aldi South Holdings, has also signed on as Senior Advisor for Europe.
"For a while I measured AI in heads, counting how many people an agent could replace. It's the wrong unit," says Tomáš Čupr, Co-founder and CEO at Duvo and Founder and Group CEO at Rohlik Group. "At Rohlik, the gains I'd point to came from work nobody had the hours for. Our planners used to check about eight at-risk products a day per market for shortages. Now every signal gets checked, around the clock. We think of it as raising the GDP of every employee: more value from the people a company has, not the same value from fewer of them."
Kingfisher raids European home improvement retailer OBI to bring in Sebastian Gundel as CEO
Kingfisher, which owns B&Q and Screwfix in the UK and Castorama and Brico Depot in France and other markets, has announced the appointment of Sebastian Gundel as Chief Executive Officer, effective 1st February 2027. He will join Kingfisher’s board of directors on the same date.
He brings more than two decades of leadership experience in the home improvement sector, including as Chief Executive Officer at European retailer OBI, where he led the company's evolution from traditional retail to a digitally enabled, customer centric, omnichannel business.
Prior to becoming CEO, he served as Chief Customer & Digital Officer, leading OBI's omnichannel transformation and digital innovation agenda. His responsibilities spanned loyalty, marketplaces and ecosystem development, as well as the expansion of trade propositions.
Claudia Arney, Chair, says: “Following a thorough selection process, the board is delighted to appoint Sebastian as Chief Executive Officer. Sebastian combines deep experience in home improvement retail and clear expertise in Kingfisher’s strategic growth drivers with a strong track record of innovation and operational delivery. He will build on the significant progress made under Thierry Garnier’s leadership while bringing fresh perspectives as we continue to evolve the business. Sebastian has the board’s full support as he leads Kingfisher through its next phase of growth and value creation.”
The first step in a much bigger journey as Frasers Group switches on first D365 WMS warehouse
Frasers Group, whose brands include Sports Direct, House of Fraser, and Flannels, reports that Antrim in Northern Ireland has become the first of its warehouses to go live with a Microsoft Dynamics 365 warehouse management system (WMS).
In a LinkedIn post, Jakob Vestergaard, Product Manager - Warehouse at Frasers Group, said: "Two years of work. One major milestone. We're live. As the first warehouse in the group to adopt D365 WMS, Antrim marks an important milestone in our wider warehouse transformation journey."
"Over the last few years, Frasers Group has invested heavily in elevating our stores. This programme is about taking the next step by elevating the warehouse operations that power them, creating a more scalable, visible and consistent platform to support our stores, brands and customers. This achievement would not have been possible without the dedication of teams across the business and our partners."
He concluded: "Go live is a major achievement, but it isn't the end of the story. Over the coming months we'll continue working with our warehouse teams, Microsoft, Binary and InterRadish to refine the solution, introduce additional capabilities and build out the global warehouse template that will support future warehouse deployments across Frasers Group. This is the first step in a much bigger journey. Looking forward to what comes next."
Currys hits TikTok Shop and Sainsbury's launches Smartlists: last week's biggest retail technology plays
Including VenHub Global, Asda, Rokt, The Very Group, Made With Intent, VoCoVo, Cotswold Outdoor Group, Wayfair, Klarna, Zalando, gorjana, Walmart, Wing, Panda Retail, Deliveroo, and Sur la table.
