Caper
wants to deliver a major update to the self-checkout aisle without
keeping its dreaded catchphrases, i.e. “Unknown item in the bagging
area,” “Please place the item in the bag.”
The New York startup is
tapping some of Silicon Valley’s more recognizable VC firms to fund
their dreams for a shopping cart of the future that uses computer vision
and other sensors to let shoppers quickly scan items as they drop them
into their carts.
The company is announcing that they’ve closed a $10 million Series A led by Lux Capital .
The round also saw participation from First Round Capital, Y
Combinator, Hardware Club, FundersClub, Sidekick Fund and Red Apple
Group.
Caper
closed its $2.15 million seed round led by First Round earlier this
year. The startup has now raised $13 million to date. The startup’s
leadership plans to use the capital to bring their smart grocery carts
to more locations.
The startup says its tech could help grocery store chains bring more
seamless checkout processes to customers as the groups aim to keep pace
with Amazon, which has doubled down on physical retail automation with
its Amazon Go convenience stores.
While Amazon’s small stores rely
on a complex web of cameras and sensors tracking your purchase habits,
Caper’s solution is more insular, focusing only on what’s happening
inside a shopper’s cart.
“Instead of monitoring an entire store,
we’re monitoring this very small cart. Our computation is faster, our
cameras are a lot closer and we’re able to scale much faster because we
don’t need to implement any infrastructure inside the store,” CTO and
co-founder York Yang tells TechCrunch.
The company declined to
detail exactly how pricey these carts were for a store. When asked
whether rollouts would costs “thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds
of thousands of dollars,” Yang told TechCrunch that a full rollout at a
grocery store would “probably be within the hundreds of thousands range,
though it could be less.”
Alternatively, Bloomberg reported that Seattle’s first Amazon Go store required $1 million worth of hardware.
Caper
isn’t expecting physical retailers to go all-in and toss out their
old-school grocery carts when they become customers. Part of Caper’s
advantage is that it doesn’t alienate customers who don’t want to bring
AI into their process; those people can just grab an old cart and check
out the regular way if they don’t feel like pushing around a computer.
The
credit card reader, barcode scanner and image recognition cameras are
just a slice of the sell for investors backing Caper. It’s less about
streamlining checkout than it is finding a new way to bring AI-driven
online retail conventions into physical stores.
Personalized
recommendations, shopping lists and recipes could eventually find their
way onto the built-in touchscreen, Yang says.
“Our vision is ultimately to build a platform layer on retail that never existed before.”
Source. Lucas Marley, TechCrunch, September 10, 2019
Source. Lucas Marley, TechCrunch, September 10, 2019
***
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