Cashierless Checkout Provider Zippin Lands $30M
Zippin announced Thursday (Sept. 2) it has raised $30 million in Series B funding, bringing its overall total to more than $45 million.
The latest fundraising round includes contributions from OurCrowd, Maven Ventures, Evolv Ventures and SAP and will help multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) tech company Zippin to expand its checkout-free platform to thousands of stores by 2025.
“Their technology advantage is one of the main reasons we chose Zippin. We evaluated several companies in this space and found Zippin to be the clear leader with most stores in public settings,” said Jon Medved, CEO & founder of OurCrowd, in the announcement.
“Many of the Zippin-powered stores in sports venues can attract up to 500 shoppers in a single hour, putting the underlying AI to the ultimate test,” he said. “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.”
Zippin provides checkout-free services in convenience stores, grocery stores, sports stadiums, hotels and residential buildings on four continents. Their customers include food service providers Aramark Corporation and Compass Group, Japanese convenience store chain Lawson and Brazilian retailer Americanas. Zippin delivers greater than 99.9% accuracy, even in stores with high shopper density and complex selections of products.
“Zippin has seen increased demand and rapid adoption of checkout-free technology during the pandemic,” said Krishna Motukuri, Zippin’s co-founder & CEO. “Shoppers want contactless experiences everywhere they go. 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,” he said.
Related: The ‘Third Wave’ Of Self-Serve Checkout Turns Grocery Stores Into Omnichannel Hubs
A February report highlighted in PYMNTS’ Digitizing Unattended Retail Payments study found that almost half of all consumers report that they use self-checkout “basically all the time,” and that three out of five consumers have been using self-checkout more often than they did at the start of 2020.