Radar raises $170 million in Series B at a valuation exceeding $1 billion for its ceiling-mounted sensors delivering real-time item-level inventory visibility in retail stores

AI leaving screens and becoming useful in places where objects, people, shelves, and sensors interact in real time. Radar is building the perception layer for retail that can turn messy stores into machine-readable environments where AI can identify, locate, and reason about products in real time. It is basically the “operating system for physical stores”. A lot of times, physical stores do not know whether a shirt is in the backroom, under another pile, in the wrong aisle, or if it’s already stolen. Radar fixes that by giving stores a live map of inventory, down to about 10cm, so a worker can find the exact item instead of guessing. The smart part is the hybrid design. Cameras can see shelves and movement, but crowded racks confuse them. RFID tags can identify items, but they need spatial awareness to know what is actually happening around them. Radar combines both, so the store gets the identity of each product plus the visual context around it.