Austin startup Pensa Systems is gearing up to expand its data and shelf monitoring platform for retail stores after announcing June 8 that it has raised an $11 million series A funding round. The investment was led by locally-based ATX Venture Partners, as well as a new corporate backer — Circle K Ventures, the venture arm of gas and convenience store chain Circle K.
The funding, which brings the company’s total raised to $28 million, follows a newly initiated pilot project at several Circle K locations in Central Texas. Pensa also said it has expanded its relationships with Johnson & Johnson and General Mills, which comes in addition to its work with customer and investor Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Pensa was founded in 2016 and is led by CEO Richard Schwartz. Its platform uses computer vision and artificial intelligence technologies, along with mobile phone cameras and small drones, to develop what it calls “shelf intelligence data” that helps optimize product stocking and reduce stockouts. The company says it has already logged more than 2 billion product images on retail shelves.
The company now works with grocery, drug and convenience stores.
Schwartz said via email that Pensa's core technology is the ability to train computers to see and identify items like a person.
"We are in effect indexing the physical world in a way similar to Google indexing the cyber world, starting with the physical aisle and shelves at retail," he wrote. "We have started to expand already to the so-called omnichannel world, covering both physical retail stores shopped by consumer as well as e-commerce online shopping for items to be delivered, picked up at the curb, etc."
“Major brands and retailers are realizing that Pensa has the best answer to the trillion-dollar problem of in-store visibility, which has only become more acute with the explosion of omnichannel,” Chris Shonk, managing director of ATX Venture Partners, said in a statement. “Pensa’s patented and frankly groundbreaking AI approach and novel use of automation is generating at-scale primary data and analytics for the first time in this last true black box of our modern economy.”
Pensa also said that Jared Schrieber, co-founder of InfoScout, has joined its advisory board.
Pensa currently has about 50 full-time employees, about half of whom are based in Austin. The company plans to hire for sales, marketing and engineering roles in Austin and for its distributed teams, but it didn't specify a number of projected hires.
As it expands its retail footprint, it has eyes on new opportunities.
"In the longer horizon, we anticipate many other uses for our artificial intelligence seeing and interpreting a range of other indoor and outdoor locations, taking on other activities which are hard and tedious for people to do but which, with the right technology, can be well handled by a computer," Schwartz wrote.
