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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Trigo

Cashierless Checkout Startup Trigo Raises $60M

Trigo announced today it has raised a $60 million Series B round to scale its cashierless checkout for the grocery store. The round was led by 83North with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures Israel, Hetz Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners, Tesco, and Morrag Investments. It brings Trigo’s total funding raised to date to $94 million, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Trigo retrofits grocery stores with a combination of AI-powered computer vision tech and ceiling-mounted cameras to enable cashierless checkout for retailers and customers. The end result is that customers can enter a supermarket, grab the items they need, and walk out without stopping at a traditional checkout station. Digital payment and receipts are automatic.

Last year, the company raised a $22 million Series A round and struck a partnership with U.K.-based grocery retailer Tesco. Trigo also has a partnership with Israel’s largest grocer, Shufersal.

Once the sole domain of Amazon and its Go stores, cashierless checkout has evolved over the last year to include many different companies, including Grabango, Zippin, and AiFi. Cashierless tech also has multiple use cases at this point. While the majority of its implementations are still in grocery stores, the tech is currently at stadiums, restaurants, and in apartment complexes, too.

The uptick in activity for this space makes sense given the global pandemic and an increased desire on the part of both retailers and customers to make the grocery store shopping experience more hands free.

For its part, Trigo says it will use its Series B funding to scale up, boost R&D, and expand its global presence.

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.

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.