Aisle411: Another Victory for Mobile Technology in Retail
By Amir Kurtovic @ St. Louis Business Journal on-line
Last time we wrote about tech startup aisle411, in May, CEO Nathan Pettyjohn told us the company would soon announce a big contract with a top-10 national retailer.
Aisle411, a smartphone app that allows users to navigate inside stores and located items, at that time worked in about 2,000 retail locations around the country.
Well, that number just got a whole lot bigger.
Aisle411 yesterday announced it has teamed up with Walgreens, the largest drugstore chain in the U.S., and its app will now be able to guide customers inside about 7,900 stores in the chain.
This moves makes Walgreens the first national retail to have all of its stores mapped in a mobile phone application and quadruples aisle411’s reach.
“Retailers are constantly looking for solutions to enhance their customer's store visits and improve convenience,” Pettyjohn said in a statement. “Aisle411 allows retailers to empower their shoppers by providing information such as product locations right in customers' hands, making the shopping experience more convenient and fun. Aisle411's unmatched scalability made it the perfect solution to accommodate Walgreens nationwide deployment, providing a solution for nearly 8,000 stores.”
The company was started in St. Louis in 2008 by Pettyjohn and Matthew Kulig and has since opened a satellite office in Palo Alto, Calif., to have a presence in Silicon Valley.
Aisle411 has raised nearly $6 million to date, mostly from private and local investors.
