Spending a night under the florescent lights of a large retail store to count thousands upon thousands of products used to be a right of passage for store employees.
Now it's a task that can train AI-equipped drones to more swiftly and accurately determine what's on the shelves and what needs restocking to keep those cash registers beeping.
Pensa Systems, a startup founded in Austin in 2016, has built its business on this concept -- pairing computer vision technology with AI's learning capabilities and the mobility of drones. And it announced Wednesday that it has raised $10 million in additional seed funding to further develop its systems and make inroads in the massive retail market.
The new investment was led by prior investors Signia Venture Partners, a Bay Area firm, and locally based ATX Venture Partners. Also in on the round were early investors Commerce Ventures, Capital Factory and Revtech Ventures. New investors include David Ritter, a former partner at McKinsey & Company, and James McCann, CEO of McCann Investments & Advisory. Early backer ZX Ventures, which is Anheuser-Busch InBev's VC fund, also joined the round with a few others.
“We have been impressed with the technology and early customer feedback, as well as the focus of the management team," Chris Shonk, ATX Venture Partners managing director and new Pensa Systems board member, said in a statement. "We get really excited when we see artificial intelligence being used to shake up a big, stalwart industry – and deliver the insights needed to help it advance.”
The new funding brings Pensa's total to $17.2 million. And the money is being used to develop and deploy its inventory visibility system, which operates with a data subscription service with predictive analytics to project inventory trends.
Pensa says its drones and algorithms detect stockouts with 98% accuracy and can be easily scaled across store locations. The startup has already deployed in a few commercial locations to test its systems across brands and store layouts. It says it shows 40 percent more accuracy than the traditional approach of looking for holes on the shelves.
And knowing what has already been bought up helps retailers restock faster and rack up more sales.
“It is now clear that the combination of AI and vision technology will have an enormous impact on retail store operations,” said McCann, who has led grocery businesses around the world for Ahold-Delhaize, Tesco and Carrefour. “Having looked at the different start-ups in this area, I believe that Pensa’s combination of industry leading accuracy and much lower capex requirement will make them the winning options for most retailers.”
