While Amazon Go helped popularize the concept of completely contactless stores, the arena is growing with others like 7-Eleven and Walmart entering the category, as well as several startups such as Standard Cognition, Zippin, AiFi, Grabango, and Trigo.
In Europe, Portuguese startup Sensei has been capitalizing on this momentum to grow its contactless store platform, and it has now raised €15 million (about $16.2 million) in a Series A funding round led by BlueCrow Capital.
Sensei says its system uses computer vision and AI-powered sensors to automatically update the store payment system with the contents of customers’ carts, and when they’re ready to check out, it will display a list of the items, all ready to be paid for.
“There’s two problems in the retail industry. The experience for customers sucks. Secondly, it’s very hard to process all of the sales information in real time,” said Vasco Portugal, CEO and co-founder of Sensei. “Now, it’s really about the automation of stores, like the automation of cars and the automation of factories. I think it’s a natural transition,” he added.
Portugal said the company has “been growing, especially last year.” With fresh cash in the bank, the startup is now aiming to have 1,000 fully autonomous points of sale by 2026. It has operations with clients in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Brazil, and plans to expand into central and northern Europe.
The competition in the space is enormous. Other startups that have raised sizable rounds include Standard Cognition ($239.4 million), Trigo ($199 million), Grabango ($93.8 million), AiFi ($87.1 million), and Zippin ($44 million).
New investors Lince Capital, Explorer Investments, and Kamay Ventures (backed by Coca-Cola and Arcor Group) also participated in Sensei’s Series A, as did existing investors Metro AG and Techstars Ventures.
In 2021, Lisbon-based Sensei raised a seed round of $6.5 million (€5.4 million). Back then, the funding was led by Seaya Ventures and Iberis Capital, with participation from 200M Fund.
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