Caper develops a smart grocery cart outfitted with computer vision, image-recognition cameras, barcode scanners and a credit-card reader to let shoppers scan items as they drop them into the cart. The system is designed to monitor only the cart rather than an entire store, which the company says yields faster computation, closer cameras and easier scaling versus store-wide approaches. Caper also envisions on-cart features such as personalized recommendations, shopping lists and recipes delivered via a built-in touchscreen. The company plans to use new capital to bring its smart carts to more store locations and does not expect retailers to discard traditional carts—customers can still choose a regular cart and checkout normally. Caper has raised $13 million to date, including a $2.15 million seed earlier this year. The startup positions its product as a way for grocers to add seamless checkout automation while competing with initiatives like Amazon Go. Caper builds smart shopping carts equipped with barcode scanners, a credit-card swiper, three image-recognition cameras and a weight sensor to automatically identify items as shoppers add them. The company currently sells carts to merchants (who pay a technology subscription and receive free hardware upgrades) and says stores equipped with its carts see shoppers buy about 18% more per visit. Caper is piloting its technology in two retailers in the NYC area and is finalizing scanless capabilities that combine camera images with weight data. The startup also collects in-store route and dwell-time data to help retailers optimize layouts and plans to surface promotions and recipe-based recommendations on the cart. With the new funding, Caper intends to expand to more stores and develop a smaller smart shopping basket for smaller retailers. The company says shops buy the carts outright and subscribe to its software, but it has not disclosed cart pricing publicly.

Total raised

$12M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Sep 2019