While Amazon Go helped pioneer the concept of completely contactless stores, others, like 7-Eleven and Walmart, have entered the territory. And the sector is growing, partly because several startups – comparable to Standard Cognition, Zippin, AiFi, Grabango, Trigo – have proliferated and are offering their technology to retailers.
But there’s a Portuguese startup in Europe Sensei has expanded its contactless store platform and has now closed a €15 million Series A financing round led by BlueCrow Capital. Also involved were latest investors Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and Kamay Ventures (the investment arm of Coca-Cola and Arcor Group) in addition to existing investors Metro AG and Techstars Ventures.
In 2021 based in Lisbon Sensei has raised a seed round of $6.5 million (€5.4 million). At that point the financing was led by Like these ventures And Iberis Capitalwith participation of 200 million fund.
The startup now goals to create 1,000 fully autonomous points of sale by 2026. The company already operates with customers in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Brazil and is planning to expand into Central and Northern Europe.
Using computer vision, AI-powered sensors and real-time algorithms, Sensei's system robotically updates a customer's shopping cart and displays a listing of things able to pay, while protecting identity and privacy.
Contactless stores reduce checkout costs, prevent stock-outs, and supply retailers with real-time visibility into store operations.
In a phone call with Vasco Portugal, CEO and co-founder of Sensei, he said the corporate has “grown especially within the last 12 months.” . We are actually present in five regions.”
“There are two problems in retail. The customer experience is terrible. Secondly, it is vitally difficult to process all sales information in real time. Now it's really about automating businesses, like automating cars and automating factories. I feel it’s a natural transition,” he added.
The competition on this area is gigantic. Other competitors trying to raise large rounds of funding from investors include Standard Cognition, which has raised $239.4 million; Trigo, which raised $199 million; Grabango, which raised $93.8 million; AiFi, which raised $87.1 million; and Zippin, which raised $44 million.
