Davidson-based Grocery Shopii has raised a $1 million seed round that comes on the heels of a partnership with Microsoft.
Grocery Shopii, founded in 2018 by Katie Hotze, is a meal-planning application that helps grocers get more customers to fill their online carts and purchase online orders. Grocery Shopii has created a tool that allows shoppers to select the meal they'd like to make. The startup auto-populates the user's cart with all of the ingredients necessary to make that meal.
The startup's platform plugs into a grocer's existing e-commerce platform and creates available recipes for customers to choose from. The idea is to create a more convenient experience for online shoppers by saving them time from adding each individual item they need to prepare a meal.
Hotze said the round, which closed last month, was led by angel investors out of Charlotte, Atlanta and Richmond, Virginia. It will be used to build out what Hotze considers the company's "next generation digital capabilities."
"The meal fatigue is so real right now, and home cooking has never been embraced more than it is in this moment," she said. "We really have to capitalize on the moment with small and mid-sized grocers by leveraging advanced analytics capabilities."
Hotze said Grocery Shopii's artificial intelligence capabilities will serve to improve the outcome in digital grocery shopping. That's where Microsoft comes in.
Grocery Shopii was accepted into the Microsoft for Startups program in May. The program is designed to accelerate high-growth startups by providing access to Microsoft technology and mentors, as well as business support.
"From this partnership, we're able to test new applications," Hotze said. "It's a program we've waited two years to get into ... The grocery digital space is very archaic, and we're a pure tech platform so this is something we're very excited about."
Hotze said the Grocery Shopii team had been in contact with Microsoft prior to its acceptance into the program.
"At the right time, in Q1, they came to us and said, 'We're working on AI,' and we were working on decision science, so it was an ideal partnership that happened very quickly," she said. "We get to play in the sandbox on all different types of problems they're working on with existing clientele. We get to see if we can lift our game and supply our clients with new tech offerings and insights unavailable today in the marketplace."
The partnership is a minimum of two years, and Hotze said the gained experience and access they'll have over that period will benefit Grocery Shopii years into the future.
"The next frontier is being able to get the tech out to as many retailers as we can. We’re hyper focused on the U.S. and then being able to take the insights back to benefit the greater industry," she said. "The opportunity we have is to benefit from the insights we can create, and that’s directly in connection with the Microsoft partnership."
