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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Accel Robotics

Mastercard Partners with Accel Robotics for Cashierless Checkout Retail

Mastercard. So worldly, so welcome, and now so contact-free. The global payments company today announced its Shop Anywhere and AI Powered Drive Through tools to help retailers create low-touch shopping experiences for consumers.

Mastercard’s ShopAnywhere program is using the AI and computer vision of Accel Robotics to create cashierless checkout for stores. According to the press release, Shop Anywhere can be deployed across a variety of physical formats. Mastercard has already lined up several Shop Anywhere customers including Circle K convenience stores in U.S. and Canada; Delaware North, a global hospitality company that operates at entertainment venues, national parks, resorts and more; and at a Dunkin’ location.

Accel Robotics is based in San Diego and raised $30 million in funding at the end of last year. The company has been relatively quiet compared with its cashierless competitors like Zippin, Grabango and Trigo. But what it lacks in showiness it has made up for with a large partner like Mastercard, which can leverage its massive presence to increase adoption of the Accel’s cashierless tech.

Mastercard’s other initiative, AI Powered Drive Through, is being implemented through partnerships with SoundHound Inc. and Rekor Systems. The program promises to help QSRs “transform their drive through or drive in interactions through vehicle recognition, voice ordering, and artificial intelligence.”

Part of that vehicle recognition technology used by Rekor involves the system knowing your license plate as well as make and model of car. Knowing who you are as you pull into the drive-thru lane means that an order can be rushed out to your car faster or a digital menu could offer up a personalized set of options based on your purchase history. That is, if you don’t mind the privacy implications of a restaurant chain knowing all about the car you drive.

Mastercard’s Drive Through builds on a partnership it had with Sonic Drive-In last year, and will being doing on-location pilots at White Castle locations in October of this year. While it didn’t mention Mastercard, KFC has hinted that it could adopt this type of technology as well.

Of course, Mastercard is announcing both of these initiatives during a global pandemic. As a result, many retailers are looking for ways to reduce human-to-human contact, and the number of touchpoints in stores, including things like touchscreens and even payment terminals where consumers swipe their credit cards. In other words, we’re going to see a lot more announcements similar to this in the coming months as we establish a new normal in a coronavirus world.

Accel Robotics Raises $30M Series A for its Cashierless Checkout Tech

Accel Robotics, a San Diego-based startup that creates cashierless checkout technology, announced yesterday that it has raised a $30 million Series A round of funding led by SoftBank. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $37 million.

Accel is among a host of companies looking to create so-called frictionless shopping experiences, where shoppers enter a store, grab what they want and then exit, getting charged automatically for what they take.

We don’t know much about Accel’s technology or how it differentiates from others in the space. According to the funding press announcement, Accel uses a camera-based system along with AI to determine what people pick up (and put back). So it sounds more like Trigo and Grabango than Zippin, or even Amazon Go, both of which augment computer vision with shelf sensors.

Accel says that its technology is already being used by grocery stores, restaurants, and convenience stores in both Japan and North America. Unlike other companies in this cashierless cohort, however, Accel isn’t publicly naming those partners.

This year has been a transformational one for cashierless startups as many have announced many of their clientele: Trigo is working with Shufersal and Tesco, Grabango with Giant Eagle, Zippin with Lojas Americanas and Caper with Sobeys.

To be sure, competition is fierce in this space. Even Amazon, which kicked off the whole cashierless craze, is reportedly in talks to license out its technology to third parties, which could alter the competitive landscape even further. But there are a lot of grocery and convenience stores around the world, so there is plenty of opportunity to go around.

Accel says that it plans to use its new funding to expand worldwide by “growing operations, increasing manufacturing capacity, and streamlining its expanding deployment pipeline.”