Shopic, the smart grocery shopping cart startup, has announced a $35 million Series B investment round led by Qualcomm Ventures, bringing its total funding raised to $56 million. Other participating investors include Vintage Investment Partners and Clal Insurance, together with Shopic’s existing investors Tal Ventures, IBI Tech Fund, Claridge Israel, and Shufersal.
Shopic offers an AI-powered clip-on device that transforms shopping carts into smart carts. Utilizing computer vision algorithms, Shopic identifies items placed in the cart in real-time, while displaying to shoppers product promotions and discounts on related products. The Shopic system acts as a self-service checkout interface as well, saving customers the time and hassle of standing in line to pay.
Data collected by the company during live deployments of its system found that Shopic’s solution increased shoppers’ monthly spending by 8%.
Shopic not only delivers a new retail experience for in-store shoppers but also provides real- time inventory management and customer behavioral insights for grocers through its analytics dashboard. These reports also include aisle heatmaps, promotion monitoring and new product adoption metrics.
“Today’s consumers are used to friction-free online shopping experiences, but retailers struggle to deliver them for in-store shoppers. As the only solution that uses full computer vision rather than barcode scanning, Shopic empowers retailers to not only meet customer expectations but to delight them”.
Says Raz Golan, CEO and Co-Founder of Shopic.
The Series B investment will be used to expand the company’s penetration to global markets. Shopic’s solutions are already deployed by several grocers in Europe, the Americas and Israel. They include some of the world’s largest supermarket chains.
As opposed to monolithic smart carts, such as Amazon Dash, Shopic’s clip-on device can be used with any shopping cart, offering a highly cost-effective implementation path for grocers. Additionally, shoppers can remove the device when their transactions are complete and use the cart to take their groceries out to the parking lot, completing a truly frictionless shelf-to-car shopping journey.
Inside the cart, Shopic uses a camera duo that enables its AI-computer vision model to support large catalogs of over 50,000 items, cover edge cases and achieve low latency with limited processing power. The algorithm can even identify products thrown into the cart even when it’s in motion or when people put multiple products in their carts simultaneously.
