- Israeli startup Trigo just bagged $100 million to retrofit more grocery stores with its cashierless checkout tech.
- Singapore’s Temasek led the equity financing round along with 83North.
- New investors include SAP SE, which will also help commercialize Trigo’s technology.
- Existing investors Hetz Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners, Vertex Ventures, Viola, and supermarket giant REWE Group also joined the round.
- Trigo will use the new funds to further deploy its technology across Europe and the US, and develop its store and inventory management software, StoreOS.
Why it matters:
Trigo’s EasyOut cashierless store concept is similar to the setup powering Amazon Go stores. Customers logged into the grocery store’s app can walk in, choose the items they want, then simply walk out.
Meanwhile, the Trigo system analyzes feeds from shelf sensors and ceiling-mounted cameras to generate a “digital twin” of the store. Through this, computer vision logs interactions between shoppers and merchandise. Payments and receipts are settled digitally after a customer leaves the store.
The accompanying StoreOS store operating system can track inventory in real-time. It can also minimize out-of-stock and expired items for in-store and online shopping, mitigate fraud and offer predictive analytics, among other things.
Trigo’s system is all about enhancing the in-store shopping experience for customers. Many shoppers have grown used to the ease and convenience of eGrocery; Trigo and others aim to translate that ease for in-store shopping.
“By opening multiple autonomous stores with five of the world’s leading grocery retailers, we have proven that we can deploy computer-vision and AI to empower physical stores with the same kinds of insights and capabilities that e-commerce stores have,” Trigo co-founder and CEO Michael Gabay said in a statement.
Trigo’s roster of grocery retailers includes Tesco PLC in the UK, ALDI Nord in The Netherlands, REWE Group in Berlin and Cologne, Netto Marken-Discount (also known as Netto) in Munich, Israel’s Shufersal (SAE) and Wakefern Food Corp.
Trigo will use the funds to expand to more stores from its existing partners as well as into new geographies. It will also further build out the StoreOS offering.
