Baptiste Cumin
| Baptiste Cumin | |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, CEO of Rastro |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founder of Rastro (Y Combinator S24) |
| Education | McGill University, American School of Paris |
Baptiste Cumin is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Rastro, a retail technology company that helps distributors and retailers automate the creation and enrichment of product catalogs. Rastro was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch and is based in San Francisco.[1]
Career
Before founding Rastro, Cumin studied at the American School of Paris and later at McGill University. He went on to serve as an AI lead working on Shopify's product catalog, a system encompassing approximately two billion SKUs.[2] That role shaped his understanding of the scale and complexity involved in managing product data across large retail platforms.
Cumin co-founded Rastro alongside Papa Wele, who serves as CTO and previously worked as an engineer on Shopify's checkout system, and Augustin Baudoin. The company describes its platform as "the fastest way for retailers to launch product catalogs" and operates at the intersection of retail technology and artificial intelligence.[1] Rastro was incorporated in time to join Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, placing its founding in 2024.
Rastro's platform addresses the challenge of managing large, complex product catalogs that often contain incomplete or inconsistent data. Distributors and retailers can define their catalog schema, after which Rastro automates the process of enriching product data. It's a workflow that covers pulling product specifications and pricing from supplier websites and manufacturer documentation, performing fuzzy matching against existing databases, generating product images, and outputting completed product listings in the retailer's required format. The platform also offers content translation and taxonomy optimization.[2] Not every retailer has the internal engineering resources to build this kind of tooling, which is precisely the gap Rastro is designed to fill.
Rastro's customers include distributors and retailers managing large numbers of SKUs and complex product taxonomies. According to the company's website, its clients have used the platform to create millions of products across numerous supplier sites. Customers include Sunco.com, NY Tractor Parts, and Un Amour de Tapis, a French rug retailer. Abraham Kwan, VP of Operations at Sunco.com, has stated that the partnership with Rastro enabled projects that would otherwise have remained in the company's backlog to become achievable within the same quarter.[2]
Cumin discussed Rastro's approach to product data automation in an interview on The Ecommerce Edge podcast, episode 620, titled "Product Data Automation for Distributors," part of the B2B Commerce Corner series. The interview provides additional context on the company's technology and its focus on B2B distribution workflows.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Rastro – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2025-03-18.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Rastro – Our founding team". 'Rastro}'. Retrieved 2025-03-18.