Tracking the retail technology sector during the coronavirus
Retail Technology Innovation Hub rounds up the key Covid-19 developments from last week.
Instacart has raised $200 million in a new funding round involving existing investors. D1 Capital and Valiant Peregrine Fund led the round. Instacart is now worth $17.7 billion, post-money, or $17.5 billion pre-money.
Italian queuing system venture, ufirst, is launching in the UK.
US retailer The Kroger Co. is launching two on-premise ghost kitchens at stores in Metro Indianapolis, IN and Metro Columbus, OH.
Developed in partnership with startup ClusterTruck, these will provide freshly prepared meals on-demand with no service or delivery fees.
Autonomous checkout startup Standard has landed a new customer, the University of Houston.
The university and its dinning services partner, Chatwells Higher Education, have worked with Standard to open the first store retrofitted with checkout-free technology. Standard is partnering with Chartwells on two additional stores in North Carolina and Ontario, with more to follow.
At the beginning of September, UK footfall rose to a post-coronavirus lockdown peak, buoyed by back to school shopping and the final week of the Eat Out To Help Out scheme.
By the end of the month, however, a tightening of coronavirus restrictions had torpedoed any hopes of a quick(ish) recovery. Year-on-year UK footfall decreased by 30.1% in September, with only a 4.7 percentage point improvement from August, according to research by the BRC and ShopperTrak.
Checkout-free technologies startup, Zippin, has hired Vivek Malik, formerly Senior Director of Infrastructure and Store IT at 7-Eleven, as Senior VP of Store Systems.
The Very Group’s Chief Technology Officer, Andy Burton, will depart in February 2021 to take on a new role in a different sector.
Burton joined the company last year from The Stars Group, an online gaming specialist, where he became a director following a merger with Sky Betting and Gaming in 2018.
A search is under way to find his successor. The Very Group made the announcement as it reported a return to profit, with revenue topping £2 billion for the first time.
21% of UK workers feel more vulnerable to cybercrime since the outbreak of Covid-19, according to research from PwC.
Reed Exhibitions has announced that the RetailEXPO exhibition/conference will not take place in 2021 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Westfield has announced a new How I Got Here podcast series which shares the stories of retail entrepreneurs with students as they start a new academic year amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Online electricals retailer AO is opening its third distribution warehouse in four months.
This one is its biggest warehouse to date, adding over 275,000 sq ft of distribution space to the pureplay’s portfolio with the premises at G-Park in Stoke-on-Trent.
Customers are migrating away from cash as affinity for digital payments grows, according to research by Capgemini.
This is being driven by increasing smartphone usage, booming e-commerce, digital wallet adoption and mobile/QR payments, with a predicted growth rate of 12% between 2019-2023.
Costa Coffee’s Costa Express venture will roll-out a mobile contactless ordering system across 9,000+ machines nationwide this autumn.
Tesco will over the coming weeks deploy a traffic light system at the entrances of some of its larger stores, enabling the grocery giant to manage the flow of customers in and out.
The Save Mart Companies has become the first grocer in the US to partner with robot delivery venture Starship Technologies.
