Prayas Analytics

Prayas Analytics was a data analytics company established in 2014 by co-founders Yash Kothari and Pranshu Maheshwari, who were students at the University of Pennsylvania at the time. The idea for the venture originated during a Wharton Leadership Venture trip in Utah attended by both founders. Positioned as the "Google Analytics for physical retail stores," the firm specialized in providing A/B testing capabilities for brick-and-mortar businesses.

The company's core service involved analyzing video footage from existing in-store security cameras to extract data on customer behavior. This data was processed in the cloud and presented to retailers through a web dashboard, offering metrics such as customer wait times, in-queue abandonment rates, and staff engagement levels. The technology aimed to help retailers optimize store layouts, manage staffing more effectively, and improve the overall customer experience without the need for installing new hardware. By analyzing customer movement and interaction with merchandise, the service provided insights to inform decisions on visual design and in-store advertising. The client base primarily consisted of large retailers, including Fortune 200 companies, as the benefits of A/B testing were most pronounced at scale.

Prayas Analytics was a participant in the Y Combinator accelerator's summer 2015 class, securing $120,000 in funding. Following this, the company raised a seed round of approximately $1 million and relocated from Philadelphia to New York City to be closer to its target retail market. Despite these milestones, the company struggled with customer acquisition and generating recurring revenue. In June 2016, the co-founders announced that Prayas Analytics would be shutting down due to a lack of customer growth and the failure to achieve product-market fit.

Keywords: retail analytics, brick-and-mortar A/B testing, in-store customer behavior, video analytics, customer movement analysis, queue management optimization, retail data, Y Combinator S15, store operations analytics, checkout optimization, fixture engagement, shopper analytics, physical retail data, customer experience metrics, security camera analytics, retail labor modeling, queue abandonment, Yash Kothari, Pranshu Maheshwari, store efficiency