SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Simbe Robotics, Inc., the company leveraging robotics and AI to provide the retail industry with real-time insights into inventory and operations, today announced that seasoned technology executive David Cortese is joining the executive leadership team as the company’s first Chief Commercial Officer.

With nearly 30 years of technology and operations experience from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, Cortese will bring a wealth of expertise to Simbe, supporting the company’s commercial strategy and expanding its data services offering to third-parties. With a strong background in leveraging data to inform business decisions, Cortese will explore new opportunities to monetize Tally’s data and form strategic partnerships with interested third parties, including consumer brands, service providers, data and insights organizations and online grocery shoppers.

“We are at an inflection point, and Dave’s work will be instrumental to third-party groups looking to utilize Tally’s on-shelf data to inform better business decisions,” said Simbe Co-Founder and CEO Brad Bogolea. “Since I first met Dave while he was at Advantage, I have been impressed by his ability to strategically operationalize data to improve operations, and am looking forward to his work to define and grow Simbe’s data offerings across the retail ecosystem.”

Cortese comes from Advantage Solutions, where he most recently served as President of the company’s Digital Technology Division, leading the development of digital products, services, and acquisitions. In this role, he worked with Advantage’s portfolio of over 2,000 retail and brand clients to deploy innovative solutions that drove growth and productivity. Before joining Advantage in 2012, Cortese worked across a range of industries to drive value from data and insights, including founding and selling an analytics company in the entertainment industry and implementing the first enterprise data warehouse at Sony Pictures. Cortese started his career at Accenture, where he spent seven years advising clients across the manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications sectors.

“For the past century, retailers have closely monitored the inventory traveling in through the back of the store and out through point-of-sale, but the industry has lacked the same level of visibility into product status and movement while on-shelf,” said Cortese. “Simbe has the strongest real-time in-store insights of any retail technology company, and now, with Tally, retailers are able to gain these insights at scale never before possible. We are starting to see the fully-realized potential for this data in the broader retail ecosystem. In addition to bringing clear value to retailers, brands and shoppers, this data will also be instrumental to third-parties to better help them collaborate and deliver results to their retail partners. ”

This announcement comes after a momentous 2020 for Simbe: in September 2020, the company announced its largest expansion to-date with Schnuck Markets, rolling out Tally robots to more than half of its stores, as well as an expansion with the ninth largest retailer in the world, Carrefour, to additional stores in the UAE last month. Last October, Simbe also introduced Tally 3.0, the latest iteration of its best-in-class robot. To date, Simbe has deployed Tally in more than a dozen of the world’s top retailers across six countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

About Simbe Robotics

Simbe Robotics is the global leader in automation solutions that give retailers unprecedented visibility and insight into the state of their store environments, while improving inventory and operational challenges. Simbe is a privately held, venture-backed company headquartered in San Francisco, CA and works with major worldwide retailers and brands across the US, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.simberobotics.com.

About Tally(TM)

Tally is the world’s first fully autonomous in-store product auditing solution. Tally works in concert with retail store associates by empowering them with timely information to ensure products are always stocked, in the right place and correctly priced. Using a suite of sensors, the robot operates safely during normal store hours alongside shoppers and employees and doesn’t require any infrastructure changes to the store. Tally’s design is intuitive, friendly, and fits naturally into the retail environment. The robot scans entire stores up to three times per day and autonomously returns to its dock allowing for continuous operation. Combined with Simbe’s cloud-powered software platform, powered by computer vision and machine learning, retailers have unprecedented information and insight into the state of their stores. This information can be used to streamline store performance, maximize customer satisfaction, increase sales, and optimize operational expenditures.