The Future of AI in Retail: Our Investment in Profitmind

Profitmind recently announced a Series A led by strategic investor Accenture Ventures.

Retail is massive. It is also messy. Despite its scale and sophistication, the decisions that drive pricing, margin, and inventory still live in tab after tab of spreadsheets. When Lightscape Partners first met Dr. Mark Chrystal and Barney Govan, it was immediately clear they were not building another dashboard. They were building a true decision layer for modern retail.

Selling into large retailers is notoriously difficult. Long procurement cycles, low risk tolerances, and deeply embedded legacy systems have kept many retail analytics startups from breaking into this segment, forcing many to move down-market or pivot entirely when enterprise traction proved elusive.

Dr. Chrystal, a seasoned retail operator, understands how large retailers actually make decisions. He knows where deals stall, where budgets break, and what real ROI means to merchandising and planning teams. That operational fluency, paired with Barney’s technical leadership and a product built around real retail workflows and mission-critical data, has enabled Profitmind to win large, high-ACV enterprise customers early.

At many retailers, pricing and merchandising still run on Excel. Teams manually track a narrow set of competitors, run scenario analyses in isolation, and make high-impact decisions through internally built spreadsheets. The result is a fragmented decision process in an environment that has only grown more complex. Omnichannel dynamics, promotion intensity, e-commerce competition, and supply chain volatility have all accelerated, creating a true greenfield opportunity for intelligent retail decision infrastructure.

As enterprise buyers shift from experimentation to outcomes, Profitmind has emerged as a low-risk, category-defining AI alternative. The platform delivers repeatable, measurable impact across revenue, profits, and hours saved per week.

Profitmind embeds intelligence directly into retail workflows, tying recommendations to hard outcomes.

Lightscape’s investment in Profitmind was guided by a conviction that pricing and merchandising represent one of the largest untapped opportunities for applied AI in the enterprise. Retail remains heavily spreadsheet-driven at its core, despite growing complexity across channels and supply chains. With strategic backing from Accenture Ventures and distribution leverage through Accenture, we believe Profitmind is well positioned to become a foundational decision layer inside global retailers.

Retail is only one of many legacy industries entering a period of AI-driven reinvention. If you are building technology that can reshape massive markets and redefine how businesses operate, we would welcome the conversation. Lightscape is committed to partnering closely with founders who are building enduring platforms for the next era of enterprise software.

About Profitmind
Profitmind, based in Pittsburgh, is a decision intelligence platform built by retail operators for retail operators. The platform is designed to help merchants, planners, and marketers move faster in a market that changes in real time. Its native agentic AI architecture unifies a retailer’s strategy, internal data, and external competitive signals to deliver prioritized, explainable recommendations across pricing, promotions, inventory, marketing, and assortment, and continuously improves based on business outcomes.

Built to mirror how cross-functional retail teams operate week to week, Profitmind reduces manual reporting and spreadsheet reconciliation by surfacing a ranked set of actions tied to sales, profit, and working capital impact, while integrating with existing execution systems. Profitmind is powering mission critical merchandising decisions for retailers from $20 million to $100 billion in revenue across every merchandise category on three continents. The platform has helped drive outcomes such as a 250+ basis point profit improvement for one client and hundreds of hours saved per month in manual data work.

To learn more, visit Profitmind.com.

About Lightscape
Lightscape Partners is an early-stage investment firm backing ambitious founders at the pre-seed through Series B stages across compute, robotics, infrastructure software, data, and applied AI. Lightscape's investments include Shield AI, Standard Bots, Etched, Bucket Robotics, Profitmind, Private AI, Parloa and Articul8, among others.

Lightscape views every investment as a partnership. Depending on each founder’s needs, we drive value through strategic insights, cross-portfolio collaboration, new product and sales opportunities, and by helping to professionalize and scale businesses.

Lightscape Partners was founded by James Rowen and Sohail Khalid, who bring decades of leadership experience operating, scaling and investing in businesses. James was most recently a Partner, Board Member, and COO at Renaissance Technologies. Sohail is a multi-time fintech founder with multiple successful exits to public and private companies. His startups received backing from investors such as Point72, Softbank and others. 

Lightscape Partners' principals are supported by a team of investors, operators, and venture partners with backgrounds from OpenAI, StartX, Oak Hill, Microsoft, Uber ATG, Two Sigma, Intel, CMU, and Stanford, among others. This collective expertise enables Lightscape Partners to provide founders with hands-on support across critical areas such as technical development, go-to-market strategy, operational scaling, and fundraising.

To learn more, visit Lightscape.vc.