Retail brands fly blind. They know revenue per store, foot traffic, conversion rate. They don't know *why* a customer walked out without buying — what the associate said, what the customer asked, where the pitch broke. Vera turns the in-store conversation into structured insight.

## Why I backed it

**Untapped data layer.** This is one of the largest unmonitored data surfaces in retail. Hours of customer conversations every day, none of it captured. Vera is doing for in-store what Gong did for sales calls — and the analogy holds.

**AI as gravity field, prompts as masses.** This is a [tier-1 use of AI](/darwin/ai-tiers) — not "transcribe the meeting", but "tell me what conversion-killing behavior the team doesn't know it has". The model proposes; the operator decides what to fix.

**Founders who shipped before raising.** Small round ($600K seed), real customers, narrow focus. They aren't pretending to be the next Salesforce — they're picking a wedge and going deep.

## The bet

Brick-and-mortar retail still does ~85% of US consumer spend and a higher share in LatAm. Whoever turns the in-store conversation into structured signal becomes infrastructure. Early and small, but the wedge is clean.