7 AI startups want to give retailers a happy holiday season

There’s nothing hotter than AI startups that can help retailers win big this Christmas shopping season.

According to eMarketerretailers are turning to artificial intelligence to address everything from supply chain challenges and price optimization to self-checkout and fresh food. And retail AI is a huge, fast-growing segment filled with AI startups looking to break into a market that is. estimated reach more than 40 billion by 2030.

Here are 7 of the most popular AI startups helping retailers achieve their vacation goals:

Again: the AI ​​startup that solves for fresh food

Founded in 2017, Afresh shed a tear this year, raising a whopping $115 million in August. Afresh helps thousands of stores tackle the complex supply chain questions that have always existed around the perimeter of the supermarket – with its fruits, vegetables, fresh meat and fish. That is, how can stores ensure they have plenty of perfectly ripe, fresh food available, while minimizing losses and reducing waste of past its prime?

According to a company press release Again is on track to help retailers save 34 million pounds of food waste by the end of 2022. It uses AI to analyze a supermarket’s past demand and data trends, helping grocers keep as little fresh food as possible. The platform uses an algorithm to assess what’s currently in the store, with a “confidence interval” that indicates how perishable the item is. Employees help train the AI-driven model by manually counting inventory periodically.

AiFi: AI-powered checkoutless cash register

Santa Clara, located in California AiFi offers a frictionless and checkoutless AI-powered retail solution deployed in various locations such as sports stadiums, music festivals, supermarket chains and university campuses. Steve Gu is co-founder of AiFi in 2016 with his wife, Ying Zheng, and raised $65 million in March. Both Gu and Zheng have PhDs in computer vision and have spent time at Apple and Google.

AiFi deploys AI models through numerous cameras placed across the ceiling to understand everything that happens in the store. Cameras track customers throughout their shopping journey, while computer vision recognizes products and detects various activities, including putting items on or taking off the shelves.

Under the hood of the platform are neural network models developed specifically for people tracking and for activity and product recognition. AiFi also developed advanced calibration algorithms that allow the company to recreate the retail environment in 3D.

Everseen: AI and computer vision self-checkout

Everseen has been around since 2007, but 2022 was a big year for the Cork, Ireland-based company, which offers AI and computer vision-based self-checkout technology. In September, Kroger Co., America’s largest supermarket chain, announced that it: continue the pilot phase with Everseen’s solution, rollout to 1,700 supermarkets and reportedly in all locations in the near future.

The Everseen Visual AI platform captures large amounts of unstructured video data using high-resolution cameras, which it integrates with structured POS data feeds to analyze data in real time and draw conclusions. It gives shoppers a “gentle nudge” if they make an unintentional scan error.

It’s not all been smooth sailing for Everseen: in 2021, the company arranged a lawsuit with Walmart over claims that the retailer had embezzled the Irish company’s technology and then built its own similar product.

Focal Systems: real-time digitization of shelves

California-based Burlingame Focal Systems, which offers AI-powered real-time shelf digitization for brick-and-mortar retail, has recently taken off with Walmart Canada. The retailer is rolling out Focal Systems’ solution, which uses shelf cameras, computer vision and deep learning, to all stores following a 70-store pilot.

Focal Systems was founded in 2015 born of from Stanford’s Computer Vision Lab. In March, the company launched its FocalOS “self-driving store” solution, which automates order writing and ordering, powers inventory managers, tracks productivity per employee, optimizes category management per store, and manages e-commerce platforms to eliminate substitutions.

According to the company, business leaders can view each store in real time to see what their shelves look like and how stores are performing.

Hivery: getting the right store assortment

South Wales, Australia based Losses tackles the complex challenges surrounding space battles in brick-and-mortar stores. It helps stores make decisions about using physical space, setting up product displays and optimizing assortments. It provides “hyper-local retailing” by enabling stores to tailor their ranges to the needs of local customers.

Hivery’s SaaS-based, AI-driven Curate product uses proprietary ML and applied math algorithms developed and obtained from the Australian National Science Bureau. They claim that a six-month process is reduced to about six minutes, thanks to the power of AI/ML and applied mathematical techniques.

Jason Hosking, co-founder and CEO of Hivery, told VentureBeat in April that Hivery’s customers will be able to create rapid simulations of assortment scenario strategies around SKU rationalization, SKU deployment and space, considering each category target, merchandising rules and demand transfer. Once a strategy has been determined, Curate can generate accompanying planograms for execution.

Lily AI: Connecting Shoppers to Products

Just a month ago, lily AIconnecting a retailer’s shoppers with products they might want raised $25 million in new capital — no small feat in these tight times.

When Purva Gupta and Sowmiya Narayanan launched Lily AI in 2015, the Mountain View, California-based company was trying to tackle a thorny e-commerce challenge: shoppers leaving a site before making a purchase.

For clients that include ThredUP and Everlane, Lily AI uses algorithms that combine in-depth product tagging with in-depth psychographics analysis to power an online store’s search engines and product discovery carousels. For example, Lily will capture details about a brand’s product style and fits and use customer data from other brands to predict a customer’s affinity with features of products in the catalog.

Shopic: one of many smart AI startups

Tel Aviv-based Shopic has been making waves with its AI-powered clip-on device, which uses computer vision algorithms to turn shopping carts into smart carts. In August, Receive Shopic a $35 million Series B investment round.

Shopic claims it can identify more than 50,000 items as soon as they are placed in a shopping cart in real time, while displaying product promotions and discounts on related products. The system also acts as a self-checkout interface, providing real-time inventory management and insights into customer behavior for grocers through its analysis dashboard, the company said. Grocers can receive reports that include aisle heatmaps, promotion monitoring, and new product adoption statistics.

However, Shopic is facing headwinds with other AI startups in the smart cart space: Amazon’s Dash Carts are currently being tested in Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, while Instacart recently acquired Hairdresser AI.