But physical retail is far from disappearing altogether, and today a company that’s built a solution very specifically targeted at improving data around in-person merchandise sales is announcing a big round of funding as it moves ahead on some major rollouts it has inked with retailers — a sign of how things are changing, and the appetite that the market has for that. (The company declined to comment on the figure when asked.) Shakedd said that the startup has two major retailers signed up with “full roll-out agreements” that will cover more than 1,000 stores and 80 million tags on items annually when they are implemented. The tags can transmit their data as far as 10 meters but more typically seven meters — a distance that the company is working on extending so that even less nodes need to be used. The gap in the market that Nexite has been targeting is that physical retailers today operate in a kind of data desert — they set out items and sell them, hope for success, and have often huge amounts of stock that doesn’t sell; it’s a lot of trial and error with a few bits of observation and historical data thrown in to understand why — and yet by being physical locations they are essentially sitting on a mother lode of useful data if they can tap into it better.