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CTO & Co-founder

Raj Shrimali

CTO and co-founder of GrowthFactor. MIT Sloan MBA. Writes about the data and machine-learning side of retail site selection: trade areas, gravity models, sales forecasting, and the systems that make them work at scale.

Raj runs engineering at GrowthFactor and co-founded the company with Clyde and Sam after MIT Sloan. He owns the data and machine-learning side: how scores are built, what goes into them, and what the score will not tell you.

The Platform's Site Scoring Glass Box is his work. So is most of what becomes a Labs model: trade areas that fit how a brand actually pulls customers, gravity models that admit overlap honestly, and sales forecasts with a band, not a single number.

He writes about the math. Where models help a real estate team, where they over-promise, and what changes when forecasting moves from a quarterly consulting deliverable to something the analyst can rerun on a Tuesday.

Recent posts by Raj

Site Selection Software Accuracy: How to Back-Test a Score

A demo scores your worst store an 87. Here is why that happens, what it tells you about the model, and the back-test to run on any vendor before you buy.

Aug 12, 2026

What Is POI Data? Points of Interest, Explained

POI data is a structured record of physical places, each tagged with a name, category, coordinates, and attributes. Here's what it holds, where it comes from, and how it powers site selection.

Jul 17, 2026

Brick and Mortar Lives On: Lessons from JP Morgan Chase

At GrowthFactor, we are learning everyday on retail trends of industry leaders. In this blog post, we get into a major signal from JP Mor...

Nov 11, 2024

Ask GrowthFactor where to open next

Watch it pull the data, run the analysis, and explain the answer in maps and tables. It does the analysis. You make the call.