By: Chanda Kumar
Last updated : June 11, 2026 4:24 pm
In an exclusive interaction with Retail4Growth, Zithara.AI founders Varun Kashyap and Sri Devi Reddy share how their solutions help offline retailers convert anonymous footfall into meaningful relationships and repeat sales.
Have you recently walked into a jewellery store or wellness centre and been surprised that the staff who greets you already knows whether you're a first-time visitor or a repeat customer? Well, it’s not because they recognised you, but because the platform running in the background did. Zithara.AI is one such retail technology company that is revolutionizing how offline retailers understand, engage, and retain their customers.
By integrating with point-of-sale systems, in-store apps, and digital channels, the platform connects a customer's online behaviour to what happens inside a physical store. Zithara.AI’s client base includes Bajaj Electronics, PMJ Jewels, Dodla Dairy, Qmart, Mangatrai Jewellers, Meghavi Wellness, and Brown Bear Bakers among other. In a recent interaction, Retail4Growth spoke with Varun Kashyap and Sri Devi Reddy, Founders of Zithara.AI about the application of this platform and how retailers can see tangible improvements in customer retention, feedback collection and sales growth.
How does Zithara.AI approach the challenge of connecting online and offline retail data?
Offline retail has always been and will continue to be primary. But over the last 5–6 years, social commerce, online D2C brands, and general offline have all grown alongside each other. With that growth comes a flood of customer data, but for offline retailers, the picture is narrow. They typically know customers by their phone number and what they've bought in-store. Meanwhile, ads are running on Instagram, Google, and across the internet. The problem is that attributing what happens online to what happens offline is very difficult, given the nature of the business.
Zithara solves exactly that. We map the complete customer journey, right from the moment someone searches for you on Google, visits your Instagram, messages you on Facebook, walks into your store, sees your ads, and finally makes a purchase. That's the pre-purchase journey. Post-purchase, we track feedback, engagement, and everything else needed to improve customer lifetime value. That end-to-end journey is what lives inside Zithara.
We work with jewellery brands, automotive businesses, and real estate, primarily sectors heavily dependent on in-person selling. Everyone from the marketer to the salesperson to the billing counter sits on Zithara.AI and sees a single view of the customer.
How easy is it for a retailer to adopt this technology? What does the onboarding look like?
The most important starting point is mindset. The retailer needs to come with an inherent belief that staying connected with customers is essential to their business. Once that drive is there, the rest of the pieces fall into place relatively easily.
Unless a business has no familiarity with technology at all, the transition is manageable. Most retailers are ready now because they're watching their competitors and realising that re-engaging customers is the only way to bring them back.
Once a brand decides to come on board, we strongly recommend they designate a dedicated CRM person — someone who manages and understands the platform fully and drives results from it. That's the level of readiness we look for.
What specifically happens at the store level — what does the technology capture when a customer is physically present?
Currently, when a customer walks into any store, the only exchange of information happens with the salesperson. If that salesperson isn't there on the next visit, that context is lost. What Zithara.AI does is centralise all of that, so even if a different salesperson attends to you tomorrow, they know exactly where you are in the purchase journey. And that information flows upward too, where the management gets better intelligence as well. That means zero information loss.
In practical terms, everything you can measure online - how many people visited, what they looked at, what they bought, return on ad spend - is now measurable offline with Zithara.
Can you share a specific example of how Zithara.AI can deliver insights that a retailer didn't have before?
Here's a real scenario. A customer browses a brand online, sees an ad, doesn't take any action, but then spots the physical showroom and walks in. They may even mention something they saw online, but the salesperson doesn't connect the dots. With Zithara.AI, we can now tell the retailer that this walk-in customer previously viewed your ad but didn't engage online. That tells the retailer whether their digital advertising is actually driving footfall - data they simply didn't have before.
Another example is how retailers can track people who message a brand on Instagram asking "hi, what's the price?" and actually walk into the showroom and make a purchase. That link was completely invisible before. We make that journey traceable.
And for paid ads, if a brand spends a certain amount on Meta and acquires a lead, we can nurture that lead through AI tools and then, when they eventually make a purchase, tell the brand exactly how much was spent to acquire this lead, and this lead purchased ₹X worth of products. That's a clear number they never had access to offline.
How many retailers are currently using Zithara.AI?
Across all categories — jewellery, wellness, and other retail businesses — we have close to 135 retailers on the platform. Geographically, we're operating in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia.
How does Zithara.AI's loyalty offering stand apart from other loyalty platforms?
Most loyalty systems work purely on purchase history, including frequency of visits and how much you spend. But we factor in your profile and engagement with the brand: Did you like a post on Instagram? How often do you visit the website? Do you talk about the brand publicly? What's your brand affinity?
All of these signals feed into how we calculate loyalty, not just transactional behaviour. So a customer's loyalty tier reflects their full relationship with the brand, not just their billing history.
Where is Zithara.AI headed in terms of future product development?
We're moving deeper into AI. Retail-specific AI is not a future possibility but it's happening now, and we're building at the frontier of it. Expect more self-serve analytics, more AI-driven actions, and AI trained specifically on retail data rather than general-purpose LLMs.
We're also expanding into ad tech — the intersection of marketing technology and advertising. The goal is to make the entire marketing and sales ecosystem, right from ad spend to in-store conversion to post-purchase loyalty - intelligent, measurable, and connected.