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OODARIS is one year old. We started in Montréal with one question: why do retail teams spend so much of their time getting to a decision before they can make it? A year later, the answer runs in production, and the team that built it sat down together to celebrate.

A year ago, Fatih Nayebi founded OODARIS AI in Montréal to close a gap he kept meeting in retail: merchants, planners and allocators work across spreadsheets, handoffs and static rules before they can act. ALDO Group backed the company from the start and became its first customer.

The year in milestones

• Founding. OODARIS AI starts in Montréal with funding from ALDO Group and a team that had built AI inside the retailer, some of them former students of Fatih's at McGill.
• A second and a third edition. Foundations of Agentic AI for Retail, the book behind the ideas in OODARIS, gets a second edition in January 2026 and a third in October 2026.
• Launch. We introduce the Agentic OS for Retail Decisions during Shoptalk week in Las Vegas in March 2026.
• In production. Merchandise financial planning and open-to-buy run in production at ALDO Group, across its four brands.
• Giving back. In October 2026 our team mentors students at the Retail Gen AI Hackathon at McGill University, and Fatih joins the jury.

Thank you

To our team: thank you for the late nights, the careful reviews and the planners you listened to before writing a line of code. To ALDO Group: thank you for trusting us with real decisions from day one. And to the partners, students and retailers who tested ideas with us this year: thank you for every hard question.

How we celebrated

We marked the day the way we work: together. The afternoon started on the pickleball court, where the rallies were longer than anyone expected, and ended around one table in Montréal, where we raised a glass to the year behind us and the one ahead.

What comes next

Five capabilities are available to new clients today, and five more are coming soon. In our second year, we will bring OODARIS to more retail teams, one decision at a time.

At OODARIS, we're building the future of retail with agentic AI. But innovation isn't just about the technology we create. It's also about sharing what we've learned and supporting the next generation of innovators.

On October 15–16, 2026, our team had the opportunity to mentor students at the 2026 Retail Gen AI Hackathon at McGill University, where ten finalist teams took on a real-world challenge from ALDO Group: reimagining the retail returns experience using agentic AI.

Having worked closely with retailers to turn complex challenges into practical AI solutions, we were excited to share our experience, challenge ideas, and help students bridge the gap between ambitious concepts and real-world applications. Our Founder and CEO, Fatih Nayebi, also joined the jury to evaluate the final prototypes.

A huge congratulations to the winning teams!

• First Place: Ascent.
• Second Place: Dark Horse.
• Third Place: Evolve.

Special recognition goes to Code Reapers Perfect Pair for Product Fit and Detective Agent for AWS Tech Use.

Thank you to the Bensadoun School of Retail Management, ALDO Group, and AWS Canada for bringing everyone together.

For us, the most rewarding part was seeing students approach familiar retail challenges with entirely fresh perspectives. It's a reminder of why we started OODARIS in the first place: to rethink how retail decisions are made and push the boundaries of what's possible with AI.

OODARIS today launched the Agentic OS for Retail Decisions, software for retail teams that still run planning across spreadsheets, handoffs and disconnected systems. The company is backed by and in production at ALDO Group.

In most retailers, targets are set in one place, assortment is decided in another, and allocation and pricing follow downstream. OODARIS brings that work into one system. Each night it checks the business, explains what moved and proposes a fix, and a planner approves the fix before anything is written back.

At launch, OODARIS covers demand forecasting, merchandise financial planning, assortment, allocation, and markdown and pricing. Teams use it to review, simulate, explain, approve and track decisions.

“Retail teams do not need more disconnected AI. They need a better way to turn financial intent, merchant judgment, and live business context into action. That is what we built OODARIS to do.”

Fatih Nayebi, Founder and CEO of OODARIS, author of Foundations of Agentic AI for Retail

OODARIS combines retail data, shared business memory, workflow orchestration, machine learning and optimization in one system, and it works alongside the systems retailers already run.

The company is introducing OODARIS during Shoptalk week in Las Vegas, where the team is meeting retailers and partners.

Retailers can book a demo or plan a pilot at oodaris.ai.