The Deal
Andavi Solutions, a sales execution platform built for beverage alcohol and consumer goods companies, has acquired Infilect, an AI technology firm headquartered in Bengaluru, India, with a U.S. operational footprint. The combination brings together Andavi's trade promotion, pricing, and salesforce automation capabilities with Infilect's computer-vision image recognition and agentic AI engine — a stack now in production with beverage alcohol customers.
For CPG manufacturers navigating persistent shelf-compliance challenges, the promise is straightforward: a field rep photographs a retail shelf or backbar during a store visit and receives next-best-action guidance in near real time, while brand managers gain dashboard visibility into execution gaps, out-of-stocks, unauthorized TPRs, and competitor facings — without waiting for manual survey data or syndicated scan data lags.
What Infilect Brings
Infilect's platform analyzes photos and videos captured at retail — from grocery and mass-channel shelf sets to on-premise menus and backbars — extracting SKU-level data on facings, pricing, availability, share of shelf, and competitive activity. That kind of planogram-compliance intelligence has historically required expensive third-party retail audits or labor-intensive rep surveys, both of which deliver insights days or weeks after the execution gap has already cost velocity.
The agentic AI layer is what distinguishes the acquisition from a standard image-recognition bolt-on. Rather than surfacing a data report, the system is designed to prescribe the next action — restock request, display correction, pricing flag — and route it to the right person in the field organization. For brands managing thousands of doors across grocery, club, and mass channels, that kind of automated triage can meaningfully compress the time between identifying an execution problem and fixing it at shelf.
Why It Matters for CPG Operators
Retail execution has long been a costly weak link for CPG suppliers. Research consistently shows that out-of-stocks and planogram non-compliance erode a meaningful share of promoted-volume lift, undermining the ROI on trade spend — a line item that can represent 15% to 25% of gross revenue for many national brands. Tools that tighten the loop between field observation and corrective action are increasingly a category-management priority, particularly as retailers scrutinize vendor performance scorecards and tie shelf access to execution compliance.
Nina Vellayan, CEO of Andavi Solutions, framed the acquisition as an intelligence upgrade rather than a product pivot: "Infilect gives our customers better visibility into what is happening in the market and helps turn those insights into action." Infilect co-founder and CEO Anand Prabhu Subramanian pointed to global scale as the strategic rationale from his side: "Together, we can deliver faster, more actionable retail intelligence."
Infilect will maintain its existing product lines, team structure, customer relationships, and service commitments under the Andavi umbrella — a retention signal designed to reassure current CPG and beverage clients mid-contract. The combined company's near-term roadmap centers on accelerating Infilect's agentic AI capabilities within Andavi's broader category management and sales execution workflow, with beverage alcohol serving as the initial integration anchor before an expected expansion into broader grocery and CPG channels.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
