Autonomous stores firm Trigo announces recent $100m funding round
Checkout free stores specialist Trigo has bagged $100 million in funding, reaching a total of $204 million raised to date.
The investment was led by Singapore state investment firm Temasek (TEM.UL), and 83North.
New strategic investors include SAP and existing backers also joined the round, including Hetz Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners, Vertex Ventures, Viola, and supermarket giant REWE Group.
Michael Gabay, Chief Executive Officer at Trigo, says: “Over the past five years, we have built a pioneering store digitalisation platform that has been deployed in major cities, achieving impressive results with some of the most premium clients in the industry.”
“Looking forward, we will dedicate the capital raised to build upon this success and focus on three core initiatives: expanding our autonomous retail platform, building increasingly larger stores, and executing a pipeline of contracted stores around the world.”
He adds: “To further solidify Trigo’s place as a category leader, we will emphasise in-store operations by honing and strengthening our deployment capabilities, time to deployment, and shortening the overall time to launch.”
“We will also expand our capacity to retrofit additional stores and accelerate an extensive expansion in the EU and US. Bolstering these operational processes will enable us to further support our retailers’ ambitious goals and timelines to open multiple stores across geographies at scale and in parallel.”
Gabay notes that, leveraging the addition of SAP as an investor, the company will reinforce “our system’s infrastructure to integrate stores with the full range of Trigo’s StoreOS products, giving retailers the advantage of diversifying and scaling autonomous stores across formats”.
Tesco
Tesco is working on a second checkout-free GetGo store.
Self-service terminals will sit alongside an autonomous retail option when the location opens in central London in the near future.
The store in Chiswell Street (near to the Barbican) is fitted out with Trigo’s cashierless technology, which is a combination of check-in gates, ceiling cameras and shelf scales, as spotted by Toby Pickard, IGD Head of Innovations and Futures.
A Tesco spokesperson confirmed the launch to RTIH, but did not share an opening date.
Tesco’s first checkout-free store opened in High Holborn last year, following a trial at the grocery giant’s colleague store in Welwyn Garden City.
This one is also powered by Trigo tech. (NB: Tesco announced an equity investment in the Israeli firm in 2019).
During a preliminary results media call in April, Ken Murphy, Tesco Group CEO, said: “What we're learning is that the technology works really, really well.”
“Our partnership with Trigo's been really successful. […] We're now working on a hybrid model that allows customers to do either grab and go and completely frictionless or check-out on exit. We'll see how that works as well.”
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