Israel’s tech startup Trigo raises $100M for its cashier-less and checkout-free grocery shopping platform

The era of a cashier-based store is slowly coming to an end. The idea of walking into a store and grabbing what you need without having to stand in line at the cashier is slowly making its way into stores in your cities.

In 2016, Amazon introduced Amazon Go, a new kind of store with no checkout required. Two years later, the retail giant opened its first checkout-free grocery store in Seattle, Washington. The checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.

A year later, a couple of startups began to offer checkout-free grocery shopping experiences in stores around the world. Notable among them is Trigo, an Israeli computer-vision startup that provides autonomous shopping technology to stores.

We first covered Trigo back in 2019 when the Tel Aviv, Israel-based food tech startup raised $22 million in Series A funding to enable more grocery retailers to battle Amazon Go. The startup emerged from stealth with $7 million in seed funding from Hetz Ventures and Vertex Ventures Israel. Trigo has grown exponentially since its inception four years ago. In 2020, Trigo raised $60 million in Series B funding to scale the company’s ability to meet growing demand, boost R&D, and expand its global presence.

Today, Trigo announced it has raised another $100 million in a private funding round to ramp up deployment for its technology that allows customers to shop without having to wait in line at a store’s checkout.

The round was led by Singapore investment firms Temasek and 83North, with participation from new strategic investor SAP SE, who will also help commercialize Trigo’s solution. Other backers include existing investors Hetz Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners, Vertex Ventures, Viola, and supermarket giant REWE Group.

Founded in 2018 by former Google, Amazon, and Apple employees: Daniel Gabay and Michael Gabay, Trigo’s mission is to bring checkout-less experiences to existing brick-and-mortar stores. Its technology uses AI-powered computer vision technologies together with off-the-shelf hardware to retrofit existing stores.

“Our technology enables grocers to integrate the efficiencies and insights of digital commerce into the physical world while providing a frictionless checkout experience for customers. Ultimately, our solution reduces physical contact and does away with waiting in line, enabling a safe, secure, and streamlined shopping experience that’s a win-win for retailers and consumers,” said Michael Gabay, Trigo’s co-founder, and CEO.

The company applies its proprietary algorithms to ceiling-mounted cameras which automatically learn and upload data on shoppers’ movements and product choices, enabling customers to simply walk into a store, pick up their desired items, and walk out without stopping at the checkout. Payments and receipts are settled digitally.

In 2018, the same year Amazon opened its first checkout-free grocery store in Washington state, Trigo also partnered with Israel’s largest supermarket chain Shufersal to install an automated retail system in Shufersal’s 272 stores. To date, Trigo is focused on relatively small retail locations, such as an approx. 4,300-square-foot Aldi Nord store in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and a Tesco location in London that measures about 2,400 square feet.