Zippin, the leading provider of checkout-free technology, announced today it has closed a $30 million Series B funding round with participation from new and existing investors including OurCrowd, Maven Ventures, Evolv Ventures and SAP. This new round brings Zippin’s total funding to more than $45 million. This round comes on the heels of significant progress the company has made in recent months, including signing numerous new accounts, launching multiple new public checkout-free stores, and further solidifying their leading technology within the future of retail.
Zippin currently powers checkout-free stores across four continents, in diverse retail formats such as convenience stores, grocery stores, sports stadiums, hotels and residential buildings. This funding round will enable Zippin to scale its checkout-free platform and power tens of thousands of stores by 2025. Zippin’s customers include the world’s largest food service providers Aramark Corporation and Compass Group, Japan’s 3rd largest convenience store chain Lawson, and Brazil’s largest retailer Americanas, all of whom are expanding their checkout-free store footprint rapidly.
Zippin’s multi-modal AI technology is unique among its startup peers, and enables Zippin to deliver greater than 99.9% accuracy even in stores with high shopper density and a complex selection of products, including unbranded and small-sized items. Zippin’s solution works equally well in newly constructed stores and existing store retrofits. The Series B funding will help Zippin accelerate the pace of innovation in the areas of deployment and maintenance, where past initiatives like Zippin CubeTM have already cut time-to-deployment by a factor of five. Zippin’s goal is to retrofit stores within a single day with zero or minimal down time for retailers.
“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. “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. 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 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.”
