Talks with Saurabh Agrawal
Talks with Saurabh Agrawal
Suren Gounder: Turning Every CCTV Camera into a Store Analytics Engine
Suren Gounder built a business on a simple observation: most retailers already have cameras in every store, and almost none of them are learning anything from the footage.
Suren is the founder of TangoEye, the Chennai-based computer vision company that converts existing CCTV feeds into in-store analytics, footfall counting, conversion measurement, staff efficiency, and customer behaviour patterns, without requiring new hardware. TangoEye scaled to thousands of stores across brands like Lenskart, Nykaa, Soch, and Bluestone before being acquired by Lenskart in October 2023. He is now also a Venture Partner at Aroa, focusing on offline retail technology.
Suren Gounder built a business on a simple observation: most retailers already have cameras in every store, and almost none of them are learning anything from the footage.
Suren is the founder of TangoEye, the Chennai-based computer vision company that converts existing CCTV feeds into in-store analytics, footfall counting, conversion measurement, staff efficiency, and customer behaviour patterns, without requiring new hardware. TangoEye scaled to thousands of stores across brands like Lenskart, Nykaa, Soch, and Bluestone before being acquired by Lenskart in October 2023. He is now also a Venture Partner at Aroa, focusing on offline retail technology.
Background – education and career
Suren's route into retail tech was unusual. He spent around five years as an Equity Finance Trader at Credit Suisse in New York, managing short positions across Asian markets and building trading analytics tools along the way. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Boston University's Questrom School of Business and is originally from Coimbatore. He founded the company in 2017, initially raising funding from investors including Lenskart, the brand that would eventually acquire it.
3 key takeaways from the episode
Offline retail has been running on gut feel for decades. E-commerce has known its conversion rate since day one; most physical stores still do not.
The data is already there. The opportunity is not new infrastructure but extracting value from infrastructure retailers already paid for.
Store tech creates a compounding advantage. Brands that start measuring now build a behavioural dataset that later entrants cannot replicate.
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