Startup helps retailers track their products in real-time | MIT News
Startup helps retailers track their products in real-time | MIT News
https://news.mit.edu/2026/cartesian-helps-retailers-track-their-products-in-real-time-0605
Publish Date: 2026-06-05 00:00:00
Source Domain: news.mit.edu
When you picture a worker at a retail store, you probably think of someone at a cash register or helping a customer. But employees also spend a lot of their time combing through stockrooms and shop floors, fulfilling requests or online orders and generally trying to keep track of all their inventory.
Keeping track of inventory takes so much time, in part, because retailers don’t always know where everything is located. That’s why when you ask a store associate to check if they have a shirt in your size, it may take them 20 minutes to get back to you.
Cartesian is helping retailers keep track of inventory with a technology invented at MIT. The system uses wireless signals from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to items to find their precise location in a store, from the stockroom to the shop floor.
Last year, Cartesian did a study with a retailer and found its platform delivered meaningful annual savings at the store level by streamlining inventory tracking, optimizing workflows, and improving customer experiences.
“The big problem we’re solving is that about 50 percent of working hours in retail stores go to managing inventory,” says co-founder Fadel Adib SM ’13, PhD ’17, an associate professor at MIT. “That is roughly a $15 billion problem in the U.S. alone. We use algorithms to decipher indoor locations using wireless signals. The core technology enables a new level of indoor localization.”
Cartesian is already deployed in more than 700 stores across 15 countries and is working with one of the world’s largest fashion groups, Inditex, which is the parent company to brands like ZARA, Pull&Bear, and Oysho.
Beyond retailers and warehouses, Cartesian’s platform could also improve indoor location tracking for manufacturers, logistics operators, and robotics companies.
“The broad vision for what we are doing is spatial AI,” says Adib. “Today, AI does extremely well in the digital world. Now it has to…
