Loblaw Digital Veterans Raise $5.4 Million for Thri5, an AI Layer for Store Execution

Toronto startup Thri5 has raised $5.4 million (about C$7.5 million) in seed funding for software meant to close the gap between what a retailer plans at head office and what actually happens in its stores, BetaKit reported.

Whitecap Venture Partners and Mistral Venture Partners co-led the round, joined by the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, N49P, angel investors Amar Varma and Farhan Thawar, and several undisclosed individuals. Thri5 plans to roughly double its 10-person team over the next year, adding engineering, product and sales staff, and to push into enterprise retailers in North America and Europe.

Two Loblaw Digital founders

CEO Jeremy Pee and COO Herman Paek founded the company in 2024. They previously worked together to build Loblaw Digital, the online arm of Canada’s largest grocery and pharmacy retailer, into a multibillion-dollar business spanning online grocery, digital pharmacy and apparel. Pee went on to become chief digital and technology officer at Marks & Spencer, and Paek ran Kijiji Canada.

“Retailers don’t have a shortage of data, systems or plans. The challenge is translating all of that intelligence into the right action across every store,” Pee said, as quoted by Retail Technology Innovation Hub.

Thri5 calls its product an AI-native execution layer. It sits on top of a retailer’s existing systems instead of replacing them, reads signals across that data, ranks the highest-value opportunities and routes the work to the right teams, systems and AI agents, then learns from the results.

A pilot that turned into a rollout

The company’s first proof point is Wild Fork Foods, the meat and seafood retailer. Thri5 says a nine-week pilot raised sales by 3%, and Wild Fork has since deployed the software across its stores in the U.S. and Canada. “What I look for in any new tool is whether it connects what’s happening on the floor with what we plan centrally, and whether the team can actually trust the data. Thri5 does both,” said Wild Fork COO Radek Mazurkiewicz.

Melissa Belbeck of Whitecap said the founders drew the firm in, citing their “deep domain expertise, proven operating experience and a history of building successfully together.” Raif Barbaros of Mistral framed the bet more broadly: “AI’s biggest enterprise opportunity isn’t generating more insights – it’s turning intelligence into action.”