Warburg Pincus-Backed Trax Raises $125 Million Pre-IPO Funding

(Bloomberg) -- Trax, a Singapore-based startup serving the retail industry, raised $125 million in a funding round led by Boyu Capital as it advances plans for an initial public offering.

The IPO could take place in the next 18 to 24 months and the company is already in talks with both the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange, Chief Executive Officer Joel Bar-El said in an interview. Trax is valued at close to $1 billion, he said.

Trax's image recognition technology is being used by global consumer packaged goods companies, including Coca-Cola Co. and Nestle SA, to track their products on retail shelves. The company now has 175 clients in 50 countries and counts private equity firm Warburg Pincus as its biggest shareholder.

Trax came onto the radar of Warburg Pincus after team members kept hearing the company's name, Southeast Asia head Jeffrey Perlman said. It was a similar story at Boyu, a private equity firm founded by a grandson of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin.

“We were impressed by the wide recognition of Trax's cloud-based one-stop-shop solutions,” Boyu Managing Director Joey Chen said. “We believe that Trax is best positioned to help clients in China navigate the digital transformation.”

Bar-El founded Trax eight years ago after a chance meeting in Singapore with acquaintance Dror Feldheim, now the company's chief commercial officer. Bar-El wants to ultimately make Trax like a Google Maps engine for retail stores.

“Once we start mass deploying those cameras, soon after that, consumers will be able to have that,” he said. “I estimate in the next two to three years.”

--With assistance from Joyce Koh.

To contact the reporter on this story: Yoolim Lee in Singapore at yoolim@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Robert Fenner at rfenner@bloomberg.net, Edwin Chan

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