Dive Brief:
- Shopic, the developer of a clip-on, frictionless shopping device that attaches to standard grocery carts, has raised $10 million from a group of investors, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company announced on Tuesday.
- The investment round, which brings Shopic's total funding raised to $21 million, was led by Israeli technology investment firm Claridge Israel and also included existing investors Entrée Capital, IBI Tech Fund and Tal Capital.
- Shopic is among a range of companies vying to outfit grocery stores with equipment that lets shoppers pay for purchases without visiting a checkout station.
Dive Insight:
While other companies in the smart-cart space offer carts with integrated computer vision technology, Shopic is hoping to attract retailers by letting them retrofit their existing fleets of traditional grocery carts with the ability to detect items as people put them in.
Shopic said in its announcement that its unit tracks shoppers as they move around a store and compiles data that can be used to offer personalized promotions and study shopping behavior. Without being specific, Shopic said its technology can be deployed in large supermarkets and requires "minimal modifications" to a store.
The company said its customers include store operators in Europe, Israel and the United States, but it did not identify those retailers. Shopic added that shoppers who have used its technology increased their basket sizes by 10%.
The company plans to use the new funds to expand its commercial operations and hire new staff.
"This investment ... is a vote of confidence in our approach to build and deliver frictionless retail solutions that are practical, immediately deployable, and cost-effective, without having to make major changes to the way stores are run," Raz Golan, CEO and co-founder of Shopic, said in a statement.
Another Tel Aviv-based company, WalkOut, is also retrofitting grocers' existing carts into smart carts. The Israeli companies' devices function similarly to smart carts developed by Amazon and startups like Veeve and Caper, all of which also use on-board sensors to record purchases and interact with shoppers.
Smart carts are competing for attention with frictionless shopping systems from companies that use ceiling-based cameras to track items as shoppers remove them from shelves. Although Amazon offers its smart cart, which it calls the Dash Cart, in most of its Fresh supermarkets, the retailer opted not to deploy the technology in a Fresh store it opened last month, instead opting to equip it with Amazon's Just Walk Out checkout-free system.
