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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cashierless checkout

For Swiftly, Cashierless Checkout is a Gateway to a Bigger CPG Relationship

One of the big trends of 2019 was the emergence of cashierless checkout companies — startups retrofitting existing grocers with the technology that allows shoppers to walk in, grab what they want and leave the store, getting automatically charged.

So it’s fitting that as the year winds down, we look at one more cashierless checkout company. Though unlike other players in the space, Swiftly‘s cashierless technology is merely a means to a much bigger end.

Swiftly’s cashierless solution isn’t exactly the type of “friction free” shopping its rivals like Trigo and Grabango are trying to create. To use Swiftly, you must download an app to your phone, use that app to scan an item’s barcode, and then interact with a human in a special checkout lane to confirm you aren’t stealing something. While that may be more complicated for the consumer to use, the lack of hardware installation does make it cheaper for retailers to adopt.

But Swiftly is more interested in what happens after you leave the store. In addition to integrating with a grocer’s POS system, Swiftly’s system is also tied into store’s loyalty program, managing any loyalty points accrued and applying them to purchases when available. Being integrated with the loyalty program means Swifty’s system has a shopper’s purchase history, with which Swiftly can use to suggest products, whether it’s because those items are on sale or because Swiftly’s algorithms think an item might be of interest.

But even that feature is more of a gateway to Swiftly’s much broader goal, which is to leverage a consumer’s relationship with a retailer to become a product discovery service for CPG companies.

In addition to recommending specific items for one-time purchases, Swiftly also suggests shoppers subscribe to specific products. Say you want a steady stream (pardon the pun) of Hawaiian Volcano Water delivered to your door each month. You can do that in the Swiftly app, but what Swiftly is actually doing is connecting you with Hawaiian Volcano Water directly. Hawaiian Volcano Water will drop ship directly to you, but it’s wrapped up in a box with your stores’s branding. Swiftly then, is maintaining the relationship between the consumer and their retailer, and creating a new, direct connection between the consumer and the CPG brand.

I visited Swiftly’s offices in Seattle this past week where Co-Founder and CTO Sean Turner explained that his company’s solution is way for retailers and brands to outmaneuver Amazon. It’s a way for CPGs to sell directly to consumers without having to build out their own sales infrastructure, and without having to cede control over to Amazon.

With Swiftly, a CPG brand can have a direct online relationship with the consumer through Swiftly’s app via the retail brand the consumer trusts, and that CPG doesn’t have to worry as much about being undercut by the retailer.

But Swiftly isn’t the only company that’s closing the gap between consumer and consumer packaged good company. Zippin recently announced a $12 million Series A round of funding led by Evolv Ventures, the venture arm of Kraft-Heinz. As I wrote previously:

As newsy as this fundraise is for Zippin, it’s also worth pointing out Evolv’s decision to lead the round. As noted, Evolv is the venture fund of Kraft Heinz, and it’s easy to see why that CPG giant might be interested in a technology like Zippin’s. The cameras and AI in a cashierless store environment give Kraft Heinz insights closer to the consumer, with the ability to analyze what products are picked up, which ones are put back, and which products are skipped over entirely when people shop.

2019 was a year for funding and public deployments for cashierless checkout startups. Swiftly itself announced a $15.6 million seed round this past September. Look for 2020 to be a year where cashierless checkout doesn’t go full mainstream, but rather, continues a steady pace of adoption with different retailers.

For its part, Swiftly already has one live retail partnership with Zion Market, which has locations in Southern California, Duluth, GA, and Lewisville, TX. Turner wouldn’t get into specifics about revenue models for his company, but between facilitating online sales for retailers, developing direct consumer connections for CPG companies, and providing actionable data to both, Swiftly is setting itself up as a company to definitely checkout in 2020.

Exclusive: Zippin Raises $12M Series A, Announces Cashierless “Cube” Store-in-a-Box

Zippin, a startup creating cashierless checkout experiences for retailers, announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A round of funding led by Evolv Ventures, the venture fund backed by Kraft Heinz. Other investors include SAP.iO, Scrum Ventures, Arca Continental, and Nomura Research Institute and NTT DOCOMO Ventures from Japan.

Zippin is one of many companies looking to retrofit retailers such as supermarkets with technology to facilitate grab-and-go shopping with no checkout lines. Unlike most of its competition, Zippin doesn’t just rely on cameras and AI to keep track of what people pick up (and put back) while shopping. It also employs shelf-sensors for what it says is a more accurate analysis of what people take and keep as they walk out the door.

As part of today’s announcement, Zippin also said that it is making its technology more portable and accessible to retailers with the introduction of the Zippin Cube. The Zippin Cube is a modular, pre-fabricated cashierless store-in-a-box roughly 300 – 500 sq. ft. that can be assembled in under three weeks upon ordering.

The Zippin Cube is what is currently running in the Golden 1 Center Arena in Sacramento, CA. Zippin Co-Founder and CEO, Krishna Motukuri said to me over the phone last week that unlike other “pop-up” style cashierless checkout experiences — like those from AiFi, which use shipping-container-like structures — the Zippin Cube is modular, so it can fit inside odd-shaped real estate and can even include coolers for beverages and other cold items. Additionally, the Cube comes with all the wiring and mounts ready to go, so it’s easy to install the technology.

These pop-ups promise to be a game changer for food retailers. First, it allows them to quickly and affordably extend their brands into new areas relatively inexpensively. Think: a permanent pop-up mini-Kroger or 7-11 in the lobby of an office building or at a music festival. Or, if you wanted to get really nutty, a supermarket could open up a convenience store inside its existing store. This could be a super fast option for customers just needing one or two very basic grab-and-go items like milk or gum or sodas.

As newsy as this fundraise is for Zippin, it’s also worth pointing out Evolv’s decision to lead the round. As noted, Evolv is the venture fund of Kraft Heinz, and it’s easy to see why that CPG giant might be interested in a technology like Zippin’s. The cameras and AI in a cashierless store environment give Kraft Heinz insights closer to the consumer, with the ability to analyze what products are picked up, which ones are put back, and which products are skipped over entirely when people shop.

We’ve seen a flurry of funding activity in the cashierless checkout space in the last quarter of 2019. Accel Robotics raised $30 million last week, Trigo raised $22 million and Caper raised $10 million, each in September. All this funding is another good indicator that 2020 is going to be a transformational year for cashierless checkout.

Today’s funding brings the total amount raised by Zippin to $15 million. The company previously received an undisclosed strategic investment from Brazillian retailer Lojas Americanas, whos Ame Go convenience stores will be powered by Zippin technology. Zippin said today that it will be launching at new stores in the coming months.

(Photo Credit: Sacramento Kings/Golden 1 Center)

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.”

How Could Amazon Licensing its Go Technology Impact Other Cashierless Startups?

Bloomberg has a story out today saying that Amazon’s cashierless checkout ambitions are much bigger in both size and scope than its current bodega-sized Go stores. A source told Bloomberg that Amazon is looking to outfit its own larger-sized grocery stores with its checkout tech and also license it out to other retailers.

Bloomberg’s story complements an earlier CNBC report saying that Amazon was looking to license out its cashierless checkout technology, though the licensees listed then were airports and movie theaters. But if we know that Amazon is opening its own larger format grocery stores, developing new Go-like systems that work in larger format stores and is now actively seeking to license out its cashierless technology, what does that mean for all the other startups now in the cashierless checkout space?

As a quick refresher, Amazon Go stores are grab-and-go retail experiences. Shoppers scan their phone as they walk into the store where banks of cameras and sensors keep track of what people grab and what they keep, and charge them automatically upon exiting.

Amazon isn’t the only company working on this cashierless checkout technology, and we cover a number of the other players in the space. Trigo, Grabango, Standard Cognition, Caper, Zippin are all startups looking to retrofit existing grocery stores with cashierless checkout tech.

Many of these startups have even already announced retailer relationships: Trigo is being used by Shufersal in Israel and Tesco in the U.K., Grabango has Giant Eagle, Caper has Sobeys in Canada and Zippin has Lojas Americanos in Brazil.

There are a lot of grocery retailers in the world, so there’s plenty of opportunity to go around, but one has to wonder how Amazon’s 800 lb. gorilla will alter the current playing field.

To be sure, I don’t imagine large, nationwide retailers like Albertsons or Kroger, who are already scared of Amazon’s grocery growth and working overtime to fight them off, would want to then turn around and license Amazon technology. And Amazon’s largest rival, Walmart, has already built out its own Intelligent Retail Lab, which currently uses cameras and sensors to monitor inventory, but seems primed for expansion into cashierless checkout at some point.

However, smaller, regional chains might be interested in adding Go-like capabilities to their stores. And they might be more willing to license Amazon tech, which comes with a brand recognition, world-class technology and a sense of permanence (i.e. they won’t run out of money and shut down).

Amazon would surely be keen to license its Go tech to smaller chains, perhaps even at a discounted rate because it would give the company something just as valuable as money: all that shopping data. By licensing out the means for purchasing, Amazon would still get all that data about what is bought and when, without having to build out stores everywhere in the U.S. This data could then be used to feed the algorithms to make the stores they do build out physical spaces more efficient.

All this is to say that 2019 was a transitional year for cashierless checkout startups with lots of partnerships announced publicly. But with Amazon looking like it’s getting into the game, those startups will need to scale up and lock down even more retailer agreements before it’s too late.

Caper to Bring its Cashierless Checkout Smart Carts to Sobeys in Canada

Caper announced today that its cashierless checkout-enabling smart shopping carts will be deployed to the Sobeys chain of grocery stores in North America. Caper will make its debut today at the Sobey’s Glenn Abbey in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

Unlike other cashierless shopping startups that install lots of cameras in ceilings in grocery stores to keep track of what people grab and keep, Caper moves that technology to the shopping cart. Shoppers scan their items as they put them in the cart and get automatically charged as they leave the store.

The advantage to this solution, according to Caper, is that stores can implement cashierless checkout without needing to retrofit their stores. It also scales to larger stores easily, which is something that is more complex with computer vision-based systems. The Oakville Sobeys is 41,000 sq. ft. and Caper’s press announcement didn’t specify how many carts are going live or any timeline for a rollout across Sobeys 1,500 locations. Caper raised $10 million last month and at that time said it would deploy 1,000 carts in the coming year.

With the Sobeys announcement, Caper becomes the latest cashierless tech startup to publicly announce a retail partnership, something most of them had been unwilling to do until recently. Earlier this month Trigo announced a partnership with (and investment from) Tesco. AiFi launched a cashierless NanoStore for Ahold Delhaize in the Netherlands. Zippin partnered with (and received an investment from) Lojas Americanas in Brazil. And Grabango has partnered with Giant Eagle.

All this momentum heading into the end of the year could translate into tipping point, with rollouts of cashierless checkout stores accelerating in 2020.

AiFi’s Cashierless Checkout Promises Real-Time Receipts, and Nano-Sized Stores

I recently took a friend on her first Amazon Go shopping experience. She walked in, grabbed her things and walked out, as one does in Amazon’s cashierless checkout store. But she didn’t receive her receipt notification until a few minutes after we left the store.

I too have experienced this type of gap, and while I’m sure Amazon will always get its money, the bigger concern in that “dark” time is whether or not Amazon Go’s sensors and cameras accurately tallied what I took. If I don’t get a receipt until I’m back at the office and it’s wrong and they charged me too much, do I then trudge back down to the store? And at that point, how do I prove I didn’t take something?

Removing this receipt delta is one area where startup AiFi (pronounced eye-fye) thinks it has a competitive advantage in the cashierless checkout space. I spoke with Steve Gu, cofounder and CEO of the Santa Clara, CA-based company this week, who told me that the AiFi system delivers receipts in 200 milliseconds upon leaving a store. So, basically in real time.

But customers aren’t shopping at cashierless checkout stores just for faster receipts. The whole point is a more convenient buying experience, another area where AiFi might have an edge as the cashierless concept moves more into the mainstream. In addition to retrofitting existing stores with cameras and sensors to create frictionless shopping, AiFi is also building small, modular NanoStores.

These NanoStores vary in size but think of something like a shipping container converted into a convenience store. Last month, Ahold Delhaize installed and opened up a 150 sq. ft version of AiFi’s NanoStore under the Albert Heijn brand in the Netherlands. The store doesn’t even require a mobile app to enter, with customers able to use their debit or credit card to gain entrance. You can see it in action in this video:

Albert Heijn's digital store

The power of the NanoStore lies in its ability to extend a retail brand into new venues without having to do a big buildout. For example, a Safeway could open a cashierless grocery checkout pop-up store in an office building, a college campus or even an outdoor music festival. This type of semi-permanent retail is something DeepMagic has also worked on. More recently, it’s been reported that Amazon might license out its Go tech for similar type stores in cinemas and airports.

Though these NanoStores are easy to set up and run, Gu insisted that AiFi isn’t focused solely on those form factors, and that its technology scales up to larger store footprints as well.

While AiFi has been laying low — Gu said the company didn’t even announce the $11 million Series A round it closed in January of this year — it’s been busy lining up retail partners around the globe. AiFi has announced retail partnerships with the aforementioned Ahold Delhaize, Carrefour in France, Valora in Switzerland, and Żabka in Poland.

As we’ve said before, 2019 is turning into a transitional year for cashierless checkout. Startups providing the technology are maturing, and others in the space, such as Trigo, Grabango and Zippin, have all announced big retail partners this year.

With a total addressable market of, well, any retailer in the world, the cashierless checkout game is not a zero sum one. Lots of startups will get plenty of deals. The question for AiFi will be whether it gets a strategic investment from one of its retail partners like Trigo and Zippin did, and whether AiFi will be able to sign up new partners as fast as it will give you a receipt.

It’s Official, Tesco is Using — and Investing in — Trigo’s Cashierless Checkout Tech

Earlier this summer we heard rumblings that UK-based grocer Tesco was working with Trigo on cashierless checkout stores. Those rumblings have now been confirmed: Trigo informed The Spoon this morning that the two companies have announced a partnership that also includes an equity investment by Tesco in Trigo.

The exact amount Tesco invested was not disclosed, but it follows a recent $22 million Series A round raised by Trigo last month. Trigo’s total amount of publicly disclosed funding is $29 million.

Trigo retrofits stores with cameras, computer vision and AI software to create cashierless checkout retail experiences. Consumers enter a store, grab what they want and leave with the payment automatically processed.

This is the second retail partnership for Trigo, following one with Israel-based supermarket chain Shufersal last year. According to a Trigo company spokesperson, the startup has been working with Tesco for more than a year.

Details of the partnership were scarce, but the fact that Tesco publicly name-checked Trigo is another example of how cashierless grocery checkout is maturing. Retailers are no longer privately testing out these systems, but instead making announcements about them. Giant Eagle is working with Grabango and Brazil’s Lojas Americanas has partnered with Zippin. Worth noting as well is that both Trigo and Zippin have received strategic investments from retail partners, a sign that Lojas Americanas and Tesco are serious about implementing, or at least more deeply exploring, cashierless checkout.

Today’s news also comes during the same week that we learned Amazon is going ahead with leases for its own grocery store chains. The e-commerce giant reportedly has plans to open dozens of grocery store locations in addition to its existing Whole Foods stores. What we don’t know yet is whether Amazon will be using the same cashierless checkout technology it uses in its Amazon Go stores at these new grocery outlets.

With 6,800 locations, Tesco represents a potentially big outlet (and payday) for Trigo. Today’s partnership does, however, come one day after Tesco’s CEO abruptly left the company. Will the new CEO feel the same way about cashierless checkout? Momentum for this friction-free shopping seems to be gaining, so the trick now will be to see how consumers — and retailers — take to the idea.

Zippin to Open Cashierless Checkout Convenience Store at Golden 1 Center Arena in Sacramento

Zippin announced today that has partnered with Golden 1 Center arena in Sacramento to open up a cashierless checkout convenience store inside that arena next month. The store will be open during Sacramento Kings games and concerts.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the store will offer a variety of drinks and snacks including popcorn and draft beer. Much like other cashierless convenience stores, shoppers will scan the Sacramento Kings + Golden 1 Center app and/or the Zippin app upon entering the store. Once inside, an array of cameras and shelf sensors will keep track of what people grab and keep, and then charge them automatically upon leaving the store. Those who don’t have the app will be able to enter the store by presenting a valid credit or debit card.

We told you yesterday to keep an eye on locations like stadiums and arenas as new frontiers in food tech. So it’s not a huge surprise to see a cashierless convenience store alongside robot fry cooks and Postmates food pickup lines. Stadiums and arenas like Golden 1 Center are all about speed — getting you food quickly so you don’t miss any action (and so you can come back faster to buy even more). Having a store where you can grab what you want and walk out brings both speed, choice and convenience to the arena eating experience.

The entire cashierless checkout space has seen a flurry of activity just this month. Last week, Trigo raised $22 million for its technology, which is already in use at the Shufersal supermarket chain in Israel. And earlier this month, Caper, which moves the cameras and computer vision part of the cashierless equation into smart shopping carts, raised $10 million.

But Zippin has been busy making news of its own, re-launching its own convenience store in downtown San Francisco and, more recently, getting a strategic investment from Brazil’s Lojas Americanas S.A., and powering that chains Ame Go line of convenience stores.

Given the appetite event venues like Golden 1, Mile High Stadium and Dodgers Stadium have for food retail innovation, I fully expect to see more cashierless convenience store openings in the coming months. This is good news for the cashierless startups as well. These stores will be smaller (not full grocery store size), so they will be cheaper to implement and welcomed by fans who don’t want to wait in line. Most importantly, they will expose lots of people to the concept of cashierless checkout.

Everyone at these venues wins. Except for the losing team.

Trigo Vision Raises $22M A Round for Cashierless Checkout Tech

Trigo Vision, the Israeli startup that builds cashierless checkout tech for retailers, announced today that it has raised a $22 million A round of funding. The round was led by Red Dot Capital with the participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures Israel and Hetz Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Trigo to $29 million.

Trigo retrofits supermarkets with cameras and computer vision to create a line-free checkout, Amazon Go like shopping experience. The company has a partnership with Israel’s largest grocer, Shufersal, which will use Trigo’s technology in all of its 280 stores. It has also been reported that Trigo is also working with UK-based grocer, Tesco. Trigo says that its technology is currently installed in stores as large as 5,000 square feet (the largest Amazon Go store is 2,100 sq. feet).

Funding wasn’t the only news from Trigo today. The company has a new name, well, a shortened one anyway. The company announced it was lopping off “Vision” from its name and going by just Trigo.

This has been a pivotal year for cashierless checkout startups, many of which have received sizable rounds of funding. Since January:

Of these however, only Trigo, Zippin and Grabango have publicly named their retail partners: Shufersal, Ame Go and Giant Eagle, respectively. Being able to publicly announce customer names is almost as important as the money being raised at this point because it shows the retailer is willing to go on record about a specific technology solution. Once a retailer has committed with a particular cashierless solution, it’s less likely they will it out and replace it with something else.

Caper Raises $10M Series A for its Smart Grocery Shopping Cart-based Cashierless Checkout

Caper, which makes smart shopping carts to facilitate cashierless checkout in grocery stores, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding. Lux Capital led the round with participation from existing investors First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Hardware Club, Sidekick Fund, FundersClub and New York-based grocery chain Red Apple. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Caper to $13.5 million.

Caper is unique among the cashierless checkout startups: instead of installing all kinds of high-tech cameras and sensors in ceilings and on shelves, all of that purchasing automation is moved to the grocery cart itself. The advantage for the retailer is that it doesn’t have to spend all that money retrofitting a store and can simply purchase new carts.

The version of the Caper cart currently deployed requires the user to scan an item’s barcode before placing in in the basket. As this promotional video shows, the next iteration of the Caper cart will use a combination of computer vision and sensors to automatically detect and keep track of what is being purchased. The Caper cart also has a built in touchscreen which will be able to recommend recipes, specials on products and even act as a GPS to help a shopper find an item in the store.

Caper Smart Cart - Make Shopping Magic

This has been a transformational year for the cashierless checkout space as startups have received more funding and come out of stealth with retail partnerships. Last month, Zippin announced an investment from Brazillian retailer Lojas Americanas and plans to automate a series of Ame Go convenience stores. In July, Grabango announced it was working with the Giant Eagle grocery chain here in the U.S. And Trigo Vision is working with Israeli chain Shufersal as well as reportedly powering Tesco cashierless checkout.

For its part, Caper says it has processed 10,000 transactions, and plans to deploy 1,000 Caper carts in the coming year.

Given all that news, look for 2020 to be a year where cashierless checkout goes from transformational to more mainstream.

Zippin Gets Investment from Lojas Americanas, Announces Ame Go Cashierless Store

Cashierless checkout startup Zippin announced today that it has entered into a partnership with Lojas Americanas S.A. that includes a strategic investment from the Brazilian retailer as well as exclusive use of Zippin’s technology in its Ame Go convenience store chain.

The first such cashierless Ame Go store has been up and open to the public for the past four months. Up until recently, Trigo Vision had been the only cashierless checkout company to publicly named one of its retail partners in Israel’s Shufersal. In July Grabango announced it was working with the Giant Eagle grocery chain here in the U.S.

Zippin had previously only announced its own cashierless checkout store, which was more of a working lab in San Francisco. Unlike Trigo Vision and Grabango, which rely on cameras, computer vision and artificial intelligence to keep track of what shoppers pick up and eventually purchase, Zippin uses fewer cameras as well as shelf-mounted sensors. According Zippin Founder and CEO Krishna Motukuri, this combination of camera and weight sensing gives his company’s solution greater accuracy than its competitors.

While that claim would undoubtedly be debated amongst his rivals, what Zippin’s technology did deliver was this deal with Lojas Americanas. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, so we don’t know how much Lojas invested in Zippin, but Motukuri told me in a phone interview yesterday that future Ame Go stores powered by Zippin will vary in size between 250 and 3,000 square feet and will be located in high-traffic, mostly urban settings. Customers shopping at these Ame Go stores will use the Ame Digital app to make purchases, similar to the way Amazon Go customers use the Amazon Go app.

Additionally, as part of its deal with Lojas Americanas, Zippin will develop new technologies for Ame Go. While Zippin’s own store and Ame Go have smallish footprints, Motokuri said that Lojas Americanas has larger supermarkets and this deal will allow Zippin to test and scale its technology in bigger formats before going out more widely.

Zippin’s announcement today highlights that even though there is a lot of competition in the cashierless checkout space, there is also a lot of global opportunity. Previously, Motukuri had said that Zippin was working with four “major retailers,” so we expect to hear more announcements from the company soon.

Giant Eagle Announces Partnership with Grabango for Checkout-Free Shopping

Sometimes an announcement of news is as important as the news itself. This is the case with the announcement today that grocery retailer Giant Eagle has partnered with Grabango and will implement the latter’s checkout-free shopping at its stores.

There weren’t a lot of details outside of the press release, so we don’t know where the technology has been installed or when consumers will actually be able to use it. But Grabango CEO Will Glaser told me by phone, “This is not a proof of concept. This is to show that the technology has already been through proof of concept and works with [Giant Eagle’s] operations.”

And this is where the announcement of the news is equally as important as the news itself. Grabango (gruh-BANG-go) is among a host of startups looking to retrofit existing grocery stores with checkout-free shopping experiences — that is, where shoppers walk into a store, pick out what they want and leave, getting charged automatically on their way out.

Grabango, which raised $12 million in January, uses a combination of lots of small cameras mounted on a store’s ceiling along with computer vision and AI to keep track of what a person is taking. The company also integrates with a store’s existing checkout systems so a shopper could either walk out and pay via app or just pay the total to a traditional cashier on their way out with a credit card or cash.

Companies like Standard Cognition, Caper, Zippin and Trigo Vision are all in various states of pilot testing their particular cashierless checkout solutions with different retailers.

But so far only Grabango and Trigo Vision have named the retailers they are working with publicly. Grabango’s news follows Trigo Vision’s announcement last November that it would partner with Israeli supermarket chain Shufersal (and is rumored to be working with Tesco). The fact that these two retailers are now on the record with these partnerships highlights their confidence in those technologies and signals they are one step closer to actual and broader implementation.

As Albertsons VP of eCommerce, Trung Nguyen, said at Articulate, our food automation conference, grocers want technology solutions that already show they can work at scale. And big grocery chains are looking to implement this type of cashierless checkout innovation as Amazon continues to roll out its cashierless Go stores, and Walmart launched its fast lane checkout and high-tech IRL store, which features lots of cameras and computer vision for inventory management.

There are a lot of grocery stores around the world, so there probably won’t be a winner-take-all scenario for one cashierless checkout company. But Giant Eagle coming out and saying that it is partnering with Grabango and that its solution is ready for prime time is a big, well, Giant Eagle feather in Grabango’s cap.