RTIH runs through the retail technology space in March
RTIH takes a look back at an eventful month for the retail systems sector, including hefty funding rounds, trouble in the rapid grocery delivery space, and the rise and rise of sustainable food apps.
Good month for…
Autonomous delivery services specialist, Starship Technologies, raised $100 million, including a $42 million Series B funding round led by the Japanese-Nordic VC firm NordicNinja and Estonia’s Taavet+Sten.
Checkout-free technology startup AiFi secured $65 million in a Series B funding round.
Qualcomm and Verizon Communications participated in the round through their venture arms.
Discounter Aldi, German supermarket chain REWE and Polish convenience giant Żabka Group also took part.
The round brought AiFi’s total funding to $80 million, with the cash primarily being used to expand its technical team.
E-commerce platform developer, Amplience, raised $100 million in a Series D funding round led by Farview Equity Partners and Sixth Street. Existing investor Octopus Ventures also participated.
The UK tech industry is now worth $1 trillion in value, as the country’s tech sector becomes the third in the world to ever reach this landmark valuation.
The UK’s digital economy is worth more than double that of Germany’s and almost five times larger than France and Sweden, according to data by Dealroom analysed for the UK’s Digital Economy Council.
Approximately one in ten adults in Europe now have a sustainable food app, with Too Good to Go and Olio leading the way.
An analysis of the performance of these apps over the past year by App Radar has revealed that the sector gained 14 million new Android users in the past 12 months.
Product experience management and product information management specialist, Akeneo, bagged $135 million in Series D financing.
Triple Whale, an analytics platform for Shopify brands, raised $27.7 million in an extended Series A, the company’s first announced funding round since its foundation in May 2021.
Bad month for…
It was an, erm, eventful, month for the rapid grocery delivery industry, with two major players, Buyk and Fridge No More, both shutting down operations.
On the surface, the apparent reason was that both companies had Russian founders, and the events in Ukraine had resulted in them losing access to capital due to sanctions.
But there was more to the story, observed Brittain Ladd, a former Amazon exec and supply chain consultant.
Also this month…
VMware said that Carrefour France had achieved a milestone in its goal to move 50% of its applications to the public cloud by 2022.
Using Google Cloud VMware Engine, the retailer completed the migration of all VMware workloads in France to the Google Cloud Platform.
A sketch from Saturday Night Live, which was hosted by The Batman star Zoë Kravitz, featured Amazon Go, the online giant’s chain of checkout-free convenience stores. And it was most amusing.
UK grocery giant Morrisons announced a multi-year partnership with US-based rapid delivery firm Gopuff.
Nike claimed that nearly seven million people had visited Nikeland, its metaverse store, since it opened five months ago.
Walmart Global Tech said it was planning to hire 5,000 people globally this fiscal year and open new technology hubs in Atlanta, USA and Toronto, Canada.
Ocado Solutions announced a partnership with Auchan Retail Poland which will see the latter’s online business using the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP).
This agreement marks the second Auchan business to partner with Ocado Solutions.
The pair will initially build a customer fulfilment centre (CFC) to serve the Warsaw region, beginning in 2024, with additional CFCs to follow.
Auchan Poland will also leverage Ocado's In-Store Fulfilment (ISF) software across its hypermarkets nationwide. The tie up will cover both its food and non-food business.
Walgreens Boots Alliance plans to open 22 robot powered micro-fulfilment centres across the US to fill customers’ prescriptions.
By 2025, as much as half of the retailer’s total prescription volume could be filled at the automated hubs, says Rex Swords, Walgreens’ Group President of Centralised Services, Operations and Planning.
Primark could add Click and Collect services to its revamped website, although new stores in markets such as Italy and the United States are the fast fashion retailer’s main growth driver.
It said it would launch a new website in the United Kingdom by the end of March, and across its 13 other markets by the autumn.
This will provide customers with near real-time information on product availability by store and enable Primark to tap the data of its customers.
Amazon acquired Veeqo, a Swansea, UK-based company that offers inventory and fulfilment tools for e-commerce sellers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
This builds on Amazon’s acquisition of Selz last year, which set tongues wagging about the former competing more directly with Shopify in providing e-commerce services regardless of whether sales take place on Amazon.com or elsewhere.
India’s Zomato will next month begin delivering food in 10 minutes in its home city of Gurugram, in what is being pitched as an industry first. The company is calling this new service, Zomato Instant.
Walgreens owned Boots UK completed its first ever IT Stores Day during March.
Starbucks is set to deploy new handheld ordering devices to stores.
It is planning to launch Shift Marketplace, an app designed to make it easy for partners to switch and offer shifts virtually, along with a waste and recycling app.
And it will also expand the Starbucks safety Lyft programme to provide rides home for partners after dark.
Plans are also afoot to expand to 55,000 stores in over 100 markets by 2030.
The company announced these initiatives during its 30th annual meeting of shareholders, where it was also revealed that Howard Schultz, who transformed an 11 store Seattle chain into a global coffee giant, is returning to run Starbucks on an interim basis after CEO Kevin Johnson said he would retire next month, following 13 years of service.
Buymie launched a one-hour grocery shopping service in Leeds and Bristol in partnership with Asda, allowing customers to access the latter’s full online range of products with the on-demand delivery platform.
Following its acquisition last year of Zeekit, creator of a virtual fitting room platform, Walmart started to roll-out the venture’s tech, starting with a Choose My Model feature, to users of the retailer’s app and website.
Its customers are able to select from 50 models at launch, based on their height, body shape and skin tone, to have a better sense of how clothing will look on them.
Amazon is planning to close all 68 of its physical book stores, pop up shops and 4-star locations in the United States and United Kingdom.
The e-commerce giant told Reuters that physical retail remained an important way for it to reach shoppers.
It will continue to work on other concepts, such as its recently announced fashion location in greater Los Angeles and checkout-free grocery stores.
