Including Sereact and Bureau: five retail technology funding rounds you need to know about
RTIH rounds up five retail systems ventures who have recently secured significant investments in their businesses, including Kavida.ai, Serve Robotics, and Clean Food Group.
1. Kavida.ai
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.
2. Sereact
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.
3. Serve Robotics
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 raised $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.
4. Clean Food Group
UK-based biotech business Clean Food Group, which delivers sustainable oils and fats solutions to food and cosmetics manufacturers, has bagged £2.3 million in funding.
This has come from Doehler Group and Alianza Team.
Agronomics and SEED Innovations also participated in the round.
The cash will enable Clean Food Group to accelerate the scale-up of its technology platform while advancing critical regulatory and commercial pathways.
It expects to complete a Series A funding in 2024, by which time it says it will have validated the technology at a commercial scale and have a clear line of sight to near-term revenue generation.
It will raise funds at Series A to support the build out of a commercial scale manufacturing facility.
5. Bureau
Fraud and identity decisioning platform Bureau has announced an additional $4.5 million from GMO VenturePartners, GMO Payment Gateway, and existing investors to complete its Series A funding round at $16.5 million.
Total funding for the startup has reached $20.5 million to date.
“We founded Bureau to build a single source of digital trust, " says Ranjan Reddy, CEO and Founder.
“Our identity decisioning platform is purpose built to orchestrate massive, disparate data to recognise, structure, and amplify risk signals in milliseconds so that customers can reach an absolute decision in real-time.”
“The outcome is material. Working with us, companies know who their consumers are, who they say they are and that they have good intentions, while consumers know their digital identities and privacy are safe and secure.”
In addition to the funding round, Bureau has completed the acquisition of inVOID, a YC backed identity verification startup and agreed a strategic partnership with GMO Payment Gateway. It intends to leverage this to boost its global coverage, widen its IP scope and broaden its tech stack.
Reddy adds: “Compliance regulations are no longer limited to the banking sector. Nearly every sector – gig economy, crypto, gaming, e-commerce – faces regulations, some for the very first time. But companies cannot just rely on compliance. They need to know whether a digital identity, and their transaction is really who they say they are.”
“So compliance and fraud prevention from one source, in the form of a trust network is highly valuable. This acquisition does just that. It adds to the distinct strengths of our device intelligence, behaviorial AI, and no-code decisioning platform and brings additional KYC and compliance workflows to our real-time, AI-based capabilities.”
“The synergies are a game-changer for companies because for the first time they have a clear view into whether a digital identity is trustworthy all orchestrated from a single platform.”
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