Including Veloq and ShopAgentic: ten retail technology funding rounds you need to know about

RTIH rounds up ten retail tech ventures who have recently secured significant investments in their businesses, including companies focused on AI native grocery fulfillment platforms, agentic marketplace intelligence solutions for e-commerce sellers, and all in one operating systems for liquor retailers.

1. Freshflow

Freshflow, which specialises in AI powered food supply chain solutions for retailers, has closed a $10 million Series A funding round, led by Reimann Investors, with participation from Capnamic, caesar., World Fund, Venture Stars and Catatumbo Capital. It has also added IBB Ventures as a new co-investor.

In a LinkedIn post, Avik Mukhija, Founder and CEO at Freshflow, said: “Walk through a supermarket's fresh section. We've all been there: half the strawberries are mush, the avocados are rocks, the basil you wanted is gone. That's the visible tip of a much bigger problem.”

“Behind that shelf sits a fresh supply chain (producers, distribution centres, stores) that moves hundreds of billions of euros of fresh food across Europe annually. None of it runs on technology built for fresh. The systems in use today were built decades ago for canned soup. They can't handle a category that spoils and changes by the hour across the chain. Result: roughly a third of the fresh food across the supply chain, over €200 billion per year, ends up in the bin.”

He added: “Freshflow spent five years building Europe's first AI made specifically for the fresh supply chain. Today, nine of Europe's leading grocers across DACH and France run it in their stores, cutting waste by up to 30% and lifting revenue by 2–4%. From there, we're pushing upstream into distribution centres and producers themselves: "from store to source". This capital takes us further: more fresh categories, deeper into the supply chain, and into new European markets.”

2. Alitheon

Alitheon has announced the closing of a $8 million Series A1 funding round led by Emerald Technology Ventures, with participation from eBay Ventures and support from existing investors.

The cash will be used to accelerate global deployment of Alitheon's FeaturePrint technology. It says that industry has long relied on barcodes, tags, and stickers, but these external proxy markers can be damaged, detached, or counterfeited. Standard machine learning only identifies objects at a class level, recognising a generic part rather than a specific asset. Alitheon captures the inherent surface details of an object to create a unique, unforgeable identity.

The result is pitched as ‘biometrics for things’: a Zero Trust framework where no item is assumed authentic until its digital fingerprint is verified via a standard camera. With nothing added, there is no marker for bad actors to spoof, ensuring an unbreakable link between the physical object and its digital record, those involved claim.

"Securing support from such powerhouses proves the world is ready for digital first serialisation, provenance, and traceability," says Roei Ganzarski, CEO at Alitheon. "We aren't just identifying goods; we are powering the trust layer of the global economy, providing a level of security that additives and standard AI simply cannot match."

"We look for technologies that solve fundamental industrial challenges at scale," says Gina Domanig, Managing Partner at Emerald Technology Ventures. "Alitheon's ability to provide one to one serialisation without the need for labels or tags is a game-changer for global supply chains. By establishing a 'Zero Trust' framework for physical goods, Alitheon is providing the essential data integrity required for the future of automated manufacturing and logistics."

"As recommerce continues to grow, trust and provenance are becoming increasingly important across high value categories," comments Henri Jaanimägi, Global Head at eBay Ventures. "Alitheon's 'biometrics for things' represents an important step forward in the broader trust infrastructure needed to support more transparent and confident buying and selling experience."

3. Scotch

Scotch, an all in one operating system for liquor retailers, has raised a $20 million Series A, led by VMG Partners, with participation from First Round Capital, Lerer Hippeau, and Toba Capital.

In a LinkedIn post, Jake Bolling, Founder and CEO at Scotch, said: “In 2024, we set out to fix something that's been broken for 30 years: the technology running America's 40,000+ independent liquor stores. Most of those stores operate on PoS software built before the iPhone. Before Amazon was founded. In some cases, before the store owners themselves were born.”

He added: “Since launching our first store ten months ago, we've crossed $1 billion in annualised gross payment volume. That number tells us two things: (1) The problem is real, and (2) operators are ready to move. Store owners are quite literally blowing up systems they've used for two decades to partner with Scotch. While these milestones are fun to celebrate, they're far from what we're focused on. We think about the calls from owners and GMs who used to spend Monday mornings buried in distributor invoices, line by line, for hours. Now they spend that time looking at margins, planning reorders, and growing their store. That's what we built this for.”

Bolling concluded: “Our CTO, Dan Chen, spent more than a decade in liquor tech, including CTO at Drizly before its acquisition by Uber. Kevin Hodges and I built Skupos in convenience retail. We didn't stumble into this category. We picked it on purpose, and we built the team to win it. This round lets us keep building faster and with more intention. More automation. More time returned to the amazing people running these stores. Independent liquor retail is an $80 billion market that technology has ignored for a generation. Tens of thousands of stores will be getting the technology they deserve. We're just getting started.”

4. Veloq

Veloq, an AI native grocery fulfillment platform that was spun out from Rohlik Group, has landed €30 million in additional scale-up financing from the European Investment Bank (EIB). This will be used for commercial expansion across Europe and the United States.

In a LinkedIn post, the company said: "Grocery automation has a proof problem. Most of the field is hardware vendors and robotics companies extending up the stack, selling automation without ever having owned a P&L on a basket. The handful of platforms built by operators are 5× more expensive and were architected for a different era."

It added: "Rohlik Group took a different bet a decade ago by building Veloq around a running grocery business, shipping orders, owning the unit economics, and letting the platform learn from every basket that leaves the door. The numbers show it worked. 2.1 million orders a month across five markets. NPS consistently above 90. 97% on-time delivery. ~30% YoY growth to $2 billion in revenue. Veloq is the operating platform designed to run same-day e-grocery profitably across any market and any brand, across Europe and the US."

EIB Vice President Marek Mora said: "With this investment, we are supporting Rohlik in the next stage of its journey, turning proven, AI driven fulfillment solutions into Veloq."

Tomáš Čupr, CEO at Rohlik Group: "Customers want fresh, full basket groceries delivered on their schedule. The EIB's continued backing helps put it into the hands of other grocers through Veloq."

5. Standard Bots

Standard Bots has announced a $200 million Series C funding round at a $1 billion valuation, led by RoboStrategy Advisors and existing backers including General Catalyst. The company, whose customers include Amazon, says that it is now America’s largest manufacturer of AI native industrial robots. 

Other customers include Sunoco, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the US Army, along with various manufacturers across the US. 

In a LinkedIn post, Standard Bots said: “We’re proud to say that we’re on track to deploy 10% of all US industrial robots by next year. We are expanding our Glen Cove, New York facility to 70,000 square feet to scale our vertically integrated production process. We currently design almost all our own parts, including our own actuators, and we assemble every final product in-house. By 2027, we’ll manufacture everything - from metal in to robots out - right here in America.”

It added: “We believe AI native robots are the essential power tool of the 21st century - the tool that will grow American manufacturing and help every American worker to be a force at work. You just show your robot how it’s done, and it learns through demonstration. No coding, no consultants, just unbox and deploy faster than anything else on the market.”

“Right now it’s possible for the United States to revitalise our manufacturing base if we become the worldwide leader in this transformative technology. We must build American robots, and put them to work in American factories. It’s a national imperative, and it’s our central mission. This fundraise gets us one step closer to the goal. The future of American manufacturing is bright! Join Standard Bots, and show your robot how it’s done - we’re just getting started.”

6. Merchantee

Merchantee, an agentic marketplace intelligence company for e-commerce sellers, has announced a €1.8 million round led by Reflex Capital, with support from Czech Founders VC and Lighthouse Ventures. 

The combined pre-seed round and extension will fund product development, new marketplace integrations, and a European growth plan extending from Poland to the Netherlands. Merchantee is used by sellers and the digital sales teams of brands like Philips, Lindt, SodaStream, and Vilgain.

Jakub Vraspír, Founder and CEO at Merchantee, says: “Most sellers are stuck in the same place. Their marketplace channel works at some level, but scaling it means thousands of decisions a day across pricing, campaigns, and promotions that no team can manage manually. Larger companies with more resources win, every time. Merchantee’s agentic intelligence levels the playing field, working as a marketplace expert across thousands of products at once. Merchantee’s team are the first to build natively for European marketplaces, executing the full loop and giving sellers the kind of opportunity that used to be available only to the largest players.”

Ondřej Fryc, Managing Partner at Reflex Capital, says: “Jakub spent years inside the European marketplace world. He helped launch Mall.cz, the first marketplace in Czechia and Slovakia, now owned by the Allegro Group. Few founders in this category have such extensive operational depth, and even fewer have turned it into infrastructure that brands like Philips, Lindt, and SodaStream now rely on every day.”

7. ShopAgentic

ShopAgentic reports a €1.9 million pre-seed round, led by May Ventures and Greenfield Capital.

“Discovery is moving into millions of personal assistants. Transactions are moving between agents. The entire front door of e-commerce is being rebuilt, and ShopAgentic is the system on the other side of it,” says Alexander Ringsdorff, CEO and Co-founder at ShopAgentic.

ShopAgentic is a native agentic commerce system: a coordinated squad of specialised AI agents, each owning one commerce function end-to-end. From catalogue management and dynamic pricing to customer service and fulfillment orchestration, every agent has a defined job, a clear scope of ownership, and the autonomy to execute, while the merchant keeps full control over strategy and outcomes.

ShopAgentic works alongside existing infrastructure or as a standalone solution, with a low entry threshold. The company says that matters most for the roughly half of global e-commerce running on proprietary, custom built systems - merchants who can’t simply migrate to a standard platform but can no longer afford to sit out agentic commerce.

The pre-seed capital will be used to accelerate product development, deepen integrations across the commerce ecosystem, and grow the team ahead of a broader market launch.

8. Mendo

Mendo, a French startup focused on generative and agentic AI adoption, has announced a €12 million Series A. This follows a €3.5 million seed round in October 2024 and was led by Ventech and Educapital, joined by Tomcat and OVNI. 

“With agentics, AI changes status: it is no longer a tool that saves you a few hours a week, it becomes the layer that orchestrates and governs all of a company’s operations. It is this shift that makes Mendo’s positioning even more strategic today. No company will pull off this transition without bringing its people along and changing the way it is organised. They are the ones who work with it day to day, who spot the right use cases, who keep the agents running on the ground. That is exactly what we see among clients such as Groupe Rocher, PwC and Edenred. Our role is to make that adoption possible at scale, without leaving anyone behind,” says Quentin Amaudry, CEO and Co-founder at Mendo.

“The real problem with AI in the enterprise isn’t budget. It’s adoption. Tools left idle, teams using them only at the margins, and management that doesn’t know where to start in fully embedding AI into their processes. Mendo solves exactly that: from mapping the uses that already exist, through upskilling teams, to deploying in-house AI agents. With five offices in Europe (Paris, Berlin, Munich, Helsinki and Stockholm) and investments in players such as Speexx, 365 Talents and amber, Ventech has long backed companies that bring together AI and training. Mendo really is the missing piece at European scale. That is exactly the kind of company Ventech sets out to invest in,” says Audrey Soussan, General Partner at Ventech.

9. Friday4:30

Friday4:30, a platform enabling food brands and manufacturers to manage and log issues from first alert to resolution, has gained a £335,000 investment from venture capital company Haatch.

London-based Friday4:30 is the brainchild of incident management expert Emma Sykes and her son Jack, who created a platform based on his mother’s knowledge. The pair say incident management is too often unprepared, disorganised and frequently leads to a ‘Friday 4.30 moment’, where a response is created ad hoc, late in the day.

“Food and beverage has and always will face incidents, from single product failures to full scale production line shutdowns. But, in a world where news travels faster than any response can, the stakes have never been higher. I've personally dealt with hundreds of incidents. Every single one needs to be handled in a systematic way,” says Emma Sykes.  

She worked directly with food brands helping them overcome issues and incidents. “Over the years, I built a structured approach, and often said: ‘I wish someone could take what’s in my head and create software from it.’ When Jack decided to do just that, I was really thrilled by the possibilities. The businesses that come through incidents well aren't the ones with the biggest teams. They're the ones who are prepared."

Jack Sykes ran his own business while studying at Edinburgh University, creating work experience places for students at startups. His interest in technology first began when he took an online course run by Harvard University during the Covid period.

“I am not a coder, but I knew what I wanted to achieve, and there are some incredible tools that meant we could create a prototype of the product. I’d picked up so much over the years from listening to Emma and had a pretty clear idea of what incident response and preparedness involved. It's about bringing together the many moving parts. Incidents aren't always about a product or a service. They can be industry or business wide. The platform removes the need for crisis manuals, the scramble to get the right people in a room, and the age-old problem of institutional knowledge walking out the door, whether that's someone on holiday or someone who's left the business entirely."

10. Mimir

Mimir has closed a $600k pre-seed round led by Sondo Capital, alongside Nordic tech and e-commerce angel investors.

Founded in 2024 by Jørgen Vartdal Halse, Jens Kristoffersen, and Øyvind Monsen, Mimir started as an AI native customer support platform specifically designed for B2C e-commerce companies. Today, it handles a quarter of a million customer conversations per month for ~60 brands across five countries, working with the likes of VILLOID, HiFi Klubben and Holzweiler.

“Customer support is only the starting point. Our vision is to automate the operational work that slows e-commerce teams down, while giving consumers instant, personalised help around the clock. This funding round allows us to further accelerate product development, double the team, and save more time and money for e-commerce brands," says Jørgen Vartdal Halse, CEO and Co-Founder at Mimir.

Instead of adding AI on top of legacy systems, Mimir is pitched as a fully AI native operations platform specifically for B2C e-commerce. It understands orders, deliveries, returns, and products, can handle tasks end-to-end, and is tailored to the brand’s existing systems and workflows.

“We truly believe that customer service and e-commerce operations as we know it will be dramatically changed with AI. The Mimir team embodies exactly what we’re looking for; technically strong founders that combine a great product with a real market pull in a massive market," says Henrik Hatlebrekke, General Partner & Co-Founder at Sondo Capital.