Cashierless checkout startup Grabango announced today that it has raised a $39 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Commerce Ventures with participation from Founders Fund, Unilever Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, and WIND Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by the company to $71.2 million.
Grabango retrofits stores with overhead cameras and artificial intelligence to automatically keep track of what customers take and put in their baskets. Users download the Grabango app and shop as they normally would, and when it comes time to checkout, users scan a QR code generated by the app at a Grabango checkout kiosk and get charged automatically.
Cashierless checkout is gaining a ton of momentum in 2021. Startups across the globe are emerging with their own takes on the cashierless checkout space. Grabango, Zippin and Amazon all retrofit stores with cameras to keep track of purchases, while companies like Caper and Veeve use smart shopping carts. In addition to new funding, deals between cashierless checkout companies and retailers are moving from private pilots to public announcements. AiFi is working with Wundermart, for example and Caper’s smart carts are being used by Kroger.
The COVID pandemic accelerated much of the interest in cashierless checkout as retailers are now looking for ways to reduce human-to-human interactions in stores. Cashierless checkout means that one cashier doesn’t become a vector of transmission among many different people, and the technology keeps people from congregating together in lines. This technology is still new however, so even though the pandemic is receding, implementation of these systems, especially by large retailers, will still take time to evaluate and roll out.
Grabango’s system is already in use by Giant Eagle’s GetGo market in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and earlier this year Grabango released some stats on how it was being used. Some findings from that internal survey include:
- 50 percent of users were 45 or older
- More than 80 percent of visits were repeat visits
- Shoppers spent 1.3 seconds checking out during peak hours
- Refund requests were less than 0.03 percent of total volume, indicating high revenue accuracy
In today’s press announcement, Grabango said that its new funding coincides with additional store deployments with current and new customers in 2021. The company said it has signed five retail partners, including a global top-10 grocer, and multi-store deployments are underway at several of them.
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