Checkout-free technology provider Zippin has closed a $30 million Series B funding round with participation from new and existing investors including OurCrowd, Maven Ventures, Evolv Ventures and SAP. The new round brings Zippin’s total funding to more than $45 million.
This cash boost comes on the heels of significant progress the company has made in recent months, including signing numerous new accounts, launching multiple new public checkout-free stores, and further solidifying their leading technology within the future of retail.
Zippin currently powers checkout-free stores across four continents, in diverse retail formats such as convenience stores, grocery stores, sports stadiums, hotels and residential buildings. The funding round will enable Zippin to scale its checkout-free platform as well as power tens of thousands of stores by 2025.
Zippin’s customers include the world’s largest food service providers Aramark Corp. and Compass Group, Japan’s third-largest convenience store chain Lawson, and Brazil’s largest retailer Americanas, all of whom are expanding their checkout-free store footprints rapidly.
Zippin’s multi-modal artificial intelligence (AI) technology is unique among its startup peers, and enables Zippin to deliver greater than 99.9% accuracy even in stores with high shopper density and a complex selection of products, including unbranded and small-sized items.
Zippin’s solution works equally well in newly constructed stores and existing store retrofits. The Series B funding will help Zippin accelerate the pace of innovation in the areas of deployment and maintenance, where past initiatives like Zippin Cube have already cut time-to-deployment by a factor of five. Zippin’s goal is to retrofit stores within a single day with zero or minimal down time for retailers.
Technology Advantage
“Their technology advantage is one of the main reasons we chose Zippin,” said OurCrowd founder and CEO Jon Medved. “We evaluated several companies in this space and found Zippin to be the clear leader with most stores in public settings.”
Many of the Zippin-powered stores in sports venues can attract up to 500 shoppers in a single hour, noted Medved, putting the underlying AI to the ultimate test. “Zippin’s continued growth in such challenging environments is evidence of their superior technology, and also a competitive advantage, allowing their AI to train on some of the richest datasets provided by those challenging environments,” added.
Zippin co-founder and CEO Krishna Motukuri explained the company has seen increased demand and rapid adoption of checkout-free technology during the pandemic. “Shoppers want contactless experiences everywhere they go,” Motukuri said. “As retailers realize that frictionless checkout-free technology is also contactless by design, they see a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. With a checkout-free platform like Zippin, retailers can offer shoppers what they are looking for today, and future-proof their business, both at the same time.”
Founded by industry veterans from Amazon and SRI with deep backgrounds in retail technology, AI and computer vision, Zippin has developed the next generation of checkout-free technology enabling retailers to quickly deploy frictionless shopping in their stores. Its patent-pending technology uses AI, deep learning and sensor fusion to power its consumer experience: banishing checkout lines and self-scanners for good, and allowing shoppers to zip in and out with their purchases.
Zippin’s platform also leverages product and shopper tracking through overhead cameras, as well as smart shelf sensors, for the highest level of accuracy even in crowded stores. Zippin has offices in San Francisco, Dallas, Toronto and India.
