Trigo to scale grocery retail platform StoreOS after $100m funding
Trigo, an Israeli computer vision company, has raked in $100 million in a new funding round led by Singaporean investment firm Temasek and London-based venture capital firm 83North.
The proceeds from the equity financing round will be used to further develop and commercialize Trigo’s StoreOS, a store and inventory management software application, enter new markets, and scale deployment of autonomous urban supermarkets in Europe and the US.
According to Trigo, its computer vision system converts existing supermarkets into fully autonomous digital stores. This is done by producing a 3D digital representation of the physical space of the store with the help of feeds from cameras mounted on the ceiling and shelf censors for analyzing interactions between customers and items.
The Trigo computer vision system is claimed to recognize the movements of shoppers when they are in the shop, and relates that with computer vision data on the items they select.
The StoreOS store operating system will also enable retailers in real-time tracking inventory, minimize out-of-stock and expired goods for in-store as well as online shopping, reduce fraud, customize marketing, and predictively handle store and supply chain operations.
Michael Gabay (l) and Daniel Gabay (r), the co-founders of Israeli computer vision company Trigo. Photo courtesy of Tom Bartov.
Michael Gabay — Trigo co-founder and CEO, said: “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.
“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.”
Other participants of the Trigo funding round include existing investors Hetz Ventures, Vertex Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners, REWE Group, and Viola, apart from a new strategic investor in SAP.
Joern Keller — SAP S/4HANA Industry Cloud EVP and Head said: “Their [ Trigo’s] 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’s current customers include Tesco, ALDI Nord, Cologne, Netto Marken-Discount, REWE Group, Shufersal, Israel, and Wakefern Food.