Last mile automation and a brand loyalty crisis: RTIH presents the retail technology week in numbers
Do you like numbers? Do you like retail systems news? Then this is the article for you. Including Serve Robotics, John Lewis Partnership, Google Cloud, Sereact, Adobe, Carrefour Belgium, Instacart, and Kavida.ai.
2…Carrefour Belgium reports a rise in customer satisfaction across its retail network thanks to its collaboration with Goodays.
As a result of deploying the company’s platform, the retailer says it can establish even closer contact with its customers and respond to their requests more quickly, as both parties take stock after two years of cooperation.
After a pilot in late 2020, said platform was deployed in Carrefour Belgium integrated stores in early 2021, and in franchise partner stores later that year.
$30 million…Autonomous sidewalk delivery robot startup, Serve Robotics, which was spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates, has gone public via a reverse merger with Patricia Acquisition Corp, and also raising $30 million in a round led by existing investors Uber, Nvidia, and Wavemaker Partners.
This brings the company’s total funds secured to over $56 million.
Uber Vice President of Delivery and Head of Americas, Sarfraz Maredia, has now joined the board.
The latest financing enables Serve to enter new markets across the United States and advance its AI powered mobility platform.
It will also begin scaling up its robotic fleet to meet what it describes as “massive and rapidly-increasing customer demand for last mile automation”, including fulfilling its commercial agreement to deploy up to 2,000 robots with Uber Eats.
60%…Macroeconomic challenges have impacted businesses and consumers alike, spurring changes to purchasing habits. As a result, 60% of those living in London say they feel less loyal to brands than they did two years ago, according to research of 2,000 people in the UK from ServiceNow.
£100 million…John Lewis Partnership has announced a partnership with Google Cloud, worth £100 million over the next five years. This is an expansion of the relationship it has had with Google since 2012.
The collaboration is pitched as a significant step forward in John Lewis Partnership's digital transformation of its John Lewis and Waitrose brands, and its ambitions to provide customers with more tailored and personalised experiences.
Under the expanded agreement, more of the organisation's technology will migrate to Google Cloud, harnessing the cloud provider's latest offerings, including advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
The hope is that these tools will enable the John Lewis Partnership workforce, known as Partners, to be more efficient, spend more time focusing on customers, and better use data insights to help curate great products and services.
The partnership will also support a pan-Partnership loyalty programme in 2024.
$5 million…German startup Sereact has announced a $5 million seed funding round led by Point Nine and Air Street Capital.
Founded in 2021, the company is building AI powered software that fully automates the pick and pack process in warehouses and manufacturing.
Its latest offering, PickGPT, combines its patented work in computer vision with large language models, the technology underpinning ChatGPT.
PickGPT is pitched as the first commercially available robotics transformer that enables robots to understand natural language and perceive their environment with an unprecedented level of intelligence and accuracy.
The aim is to democratise access to robotics by allowing users with no technical expertise to instruct and debug the system in a simple chatbot interface.
$900,000…London-based supply chain startup, Kavida.ai, has secured a £900k investment to enhance its platform with artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.
The company, which was founded in 2020, works with manufacturers and retailers via its order management systems, allowing users to detect, track and manage issues to supplier orders before they hurt the business.
The seed investment round was led by Qima, a provider of supply chain quality and compliance solutions, and was joined by Red Bus Ventures as well as several UK angels including Chris Adelsbach, Jack Cresswell,
Christopher Carter, Ian Kemsley, Jonathan Davie, Simon Davies, Russell Puttick, and Lord John Nash.
The financing will strengthen and develop Kavida.ai’s supply chain ChatGPT which will allow procurement managers to ask important questions to a co-pilot. The technology provides visibility into the status of any order, at any point of the fulfilment process, all in real time.
The cash will also support the hiring of new employees, with the aim of strengthening Kavida’s team of AI experts and data scientists. It follows a previous raise of £300,000 in pre-seed capital from strategic investors in 2021, taking total funding to £1.2 million.
50…Instacart reports that Electronic Benefits Transfer for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (EBT SNAP) can now be used to buy groceries online via its platform in every US state.
This makes Instacart the first and only online grocery marketplace to accept SNAP in all 50 states and Washington D.C.
$240,000 and $80,000…USAopoly, a specialty game manufacturer, is using Alloy.ai technology to combine sell-through, shipment and forecasting data for more accurate planning, data management time savings and better retail execution – resulting in six figure sales increases at Target and Amazon.
The company claims also to have saved an estimated $240,000 from efficiency gains and $80,000 by reducing excess inventory as a result of using the Alloy.ai platform.
£18.6 billion…Adobe has released its UK Digital Economy Index data for June and July, revealing a combined online spend of £18.6 billion, representing the first year-on-year increase in 17 months.
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