Robots on the streets: RTIH presents six retail technology funding rounds you need to know about
RTIH rounds up six retail systems ventures who have recently secured significant investments in their businesses, including Starship Technologies, Sorted, Techtaka, and Ubamarket.
1. Starship Technologies
Starship Technologies, a company that puts delivery robots on streets in the US and Europe, has raised $90 million in funding, co-led by Plural and Iconical.
The new funding, which brings the total raised by Starship to $230 million since its creation in 2014, will be used to expand globally.
Starship robots are 99% autonomous and have made six million deliveries so far including takeaway orders to groceries in residential communities and on campuses.
2. Saleor Commerce
Saleor Commerce, a specialist in the composable commerce sector, has closed an $8 million seed extension round led by Target Global, investors behind Revolut and Auto1, and e-commerce giant Zalando.
Kevin Mahaffey's SNR fund, Cherry Ventures, backers of Moss and Spryker, and TQ Ventures, investors in Groove and Current, also participated in the funding round.
Founded in Poland in 2020 by Mirek Mencel and Patryk Zawadzki, Saleor is an open source, headless, composable e-commerce platform built for taming the complexity of multimarket commerce.
In 2021, the company closed a $2.5 million seed round to build its SaaS cloud offering, which led to adoption at brands including Lush and Breitling.
3. Octup
Octup has secured $4 million in pre-seed funding from Tal Ventures as well as the founders of unicorn companies Trax and Rapyd, to broaden the roll-out of its 360-degree end-to-end discovery platform for e-commerce.
The company specialises in processing and consolidating data from various operational domains, including marketing, last mile delivery, customer support, and warehousing.
It detects anomalies, correlations, and trends to pinpoint the root causes of cost inefficiencies.
"In creating Octup, our goal was to tap into deeper operational insights beyond standard metrics to uncover real opportunities,” says Alon Partuk, CEO and Founder at Octup.
“We believe it's crucial to understand how key business metrics like lifetime value (LTV) and client retention relate to the quality of our service. Our dedicated team tackled technical and data complexity challenges head on, developing an advanced engine to access previously elusive information.”
“This innovation now provides complete operational visibility, revealing hidden costs and delivering significant value to our clients. Companies leveraging Octup’s solution have seen their overall profits increase by up to 40%."
4. Ubamarket
IW Capital has announced a further investment of £1.25 million into its portfolio company, Ubamarket, a UK-based firm whose scan, pay and go app enables a frictionless shopping experience, with people using a mobile device with little or no in-store staff involvement.
Ubamarket is live in a number of UK stores and enables retailers to save money on staffing and hardware, while giving them the opportunity to engage and understand their customers better with the data insights collected through the app.
Following technical integrations, store group launches and ongoing retail roll-outs, particularly with Central Co-op, shoppers can use Ubamarket’s patented Magic Shopping Listtechnology to write (and share) lists, be guided around stores, receive personalised app only offers as they go, collect loyalty points, verify their age, tap to checkout and receive a digital receipt all on their own device.
5. Sorted
Location Sciences Group has completed the acquisition of UK-based delivery experience and management platform, Sorted, with the new enlarged group trading on AIM as Sorted Group Holdings.
The news comes as Shard Credit Partners, a partner to Sorted, has committed to an equity investment of £1.6 million into the group.
First announced in summer 2023, the transaction, according to a press release, “provides the enlarged group with the investment necessary to continue implementing its business strategy and serving its corporate and enterprise retail customers, which include M&S, Boohoo and Asda.”
“It will enable Sorted to continue its mission to bring e-commerce retailers of all sizes confidence in every delivery, every time.”
6. Techtaka
Techtaka, a South Korean startup that provides third-party logistics services for e-commerce sellers, has raised $9.5 million in a Series B round of funding from Altos Ventures.
Soo Young Yang (CEO), who had stints at Amazon and Coupang as a software engineer, and Kyung Wook Lee (CTO), who previously worked at Coupang, founded Techtaka in May 2020 and launched its fulfilment service called ARGO in March 2021.
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