Computer Vision Company Trigo Looks to Scale Supermarket Tech
After raising $100 million in an equity financing round, Israel-based Trigo plans to scale the deployment of its autonomous urban supermarkets across the United States and Europe. The computer vision company also plans to enter new geographies and further develop its store and inventory management software application suite.
Investors include Singapore investment firm Temasek and 83North, as well as SAP SE, which will also help commercialize Trigo’s solution. Trigo will further use the funds to increase the size of stores supported by its technology to include full-sized urban supermarkets.
The company currently partners with several grocers around the globe, including the U.K’s Tesco PLC, Aldi Nord in The Netherlands, REWE Group in Germany, Netto Marken-Discount in Munich, Israel’s Shufersal (SAE) and Wakefern Food Corp. in the U.S.
“By opening multiple autonomous stores with five of the world’s leading grocery retailers, we have proven that we can deploy computer-vision and AI to empower physical stores with the same kinds of insights and capabilities that e-commerce stores have,” said Michael Gabay, Trigo co-founder and CEO. “This investment allows Trigo to build on this success and focus on three core initiatives: expanding our autonomous retail platform, building increasingly larger stores, and executing a pipeline of contracted stores around the world.”
Trigo’s technology transforms existing supermarkets into fully autonomous digital stores thanks to ceiling-mounted cameras and shelf sensors that help create computer vision algorithms that log interactions between humans and merchandise. The solution can create a fully checkout-free experience where payments and receipts are settled digitally.
The company’s StoreOS can help retailers track inventory in real-time, thus minimizing out-of-stock and expired items for in-store and online shopping, and further mitigating fraud, personalizing marketing and predictively managing store and supply chain operations.
“Trigo’s superior computer vision technology built the infrastructure for grab-and-go shopping and laid the foundation for additional in-store scenarios of the future,” said Joern Keller, EVP and head of SAP S/4HANA Industry Cloud at SAP SE. “As a leading provider of enterprise software for the retail industry, SAP is delighted to join as a strategic investor to Trigo to support the development of the StoreOS autonomous supermarket operating system. Their solutions will complement SAP’s cloud solutions for retail, integrating seamlessly with SAP S/4HANA and pave the way towards building an intelligent store.”
Trigo and REWE launched Europe’s first hybrid autonomous grocery store in downtown Cologne with a checkout-free experience last year and kicked off its partnership with Wakefern earlier this year.
