Cashierless checkout startup Zippin announced today that equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd has invested an undisclosed sum as part of Zippin’s ongoing Series B round of funding. Zippin also announced today that it is launching its own equity crowdfunding campaign on the OurCrowd platform, with the aim of raising $8.4 million.
Zippin makes an autonomous checkout solutions that uses cameras, computer vision and shelf sensors to automatically keep track of what people take inside a store. Zippin opened up a store at the Yokohama Tech Tower in Japan earlier this year, and powered cashierless checkout sales at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado, and Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, California.
In a corporate blog post, Zippin Co-Founder and CEO, Krishna Motukuri wrote:
COVID-19 has also caused many people to re-evaluate their everyday shopping habits and start to demand a more frictionless and convenient experience. This makes Zippin the kind of company that a lot of individual people might want to invest in; investing in Zippin is a way of helping to bring about a brighter, customer-friendly future for retail.
For all of these reasons, I am personally passionate about giving individual investors the chance to be part of the future of checkout-free retail. Ever since the launch of the first Zippin-powered store in San Francisco three years ago, we’ve heard from many people that they love what we are doing and want to support our mission of accelerating the adoption of checkout-free technology.
Equity crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular investment method for a number of food tech startups. BEERMKR, Future Acres, Piestro, Blendid, Kiwibot, Renewal Mill and Miso Robotics have all turned to the crowd to fundraise over the past year. One advantage to equity crowdfunding, as Motukuri pointed out, is opening up investment opportunities to everyday folks. But equity crowdfunding can also alleviate some of the scaling pressure that comes from traditional VC funding, and can also become a marketing an community vehicle for the company running the campaign.
The entire cashierless checkout category has been on fire this year with a number of new partnerships and solutions launching. Now we’ll see if that excitement within the industry translates into cash from the general public.
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