- Standard Cognition — a company that is developing AI-based system for shopping without scanning — has raised $35 million
Standard Cognition is a company that is developing an AI-based system that allows consumers to shop and pay without scanning or stopping to check out. essentially, it is considered an alternative to Amazon Go and Standard’s platform is available to any retailers thus improving the customer experience, reducing costs, and opening new revenue streams for retailers.
Recently, Standard Cognition announced that it raised $35 million in Series B funding led by the EQT Ventures fund with participation from existing investors Initialized Capital, CRV and Y Combinator. Including this round of funding, Standard has raised a total of more than $86 million and its post-money valuation is $535 million — which is more than a 2x increase since the company raised a Series A round in November 2018.
This round of funding enables Standard to continue to focus on making its early customers in the U.S. and Japan successful while growing the team and expanding both domestically and internationally.
“We really hit it off with the EQT Ventures team, and we’re incredibly excited to have them on board as we enter our next stage of growth. Standard’s initial customer implementations are moving along quickly, and in the coming months, we’ll be able to reveal more detail about our work with our global retailers. Feedback from retailers is that Standard’s light footprint, low hardware costs, and fast installation are the main reasons why they are selecting us,” said Standard co-founder and CEO Jordan Fisher.
Standard Cognition is known for opening San Francisco’s first autonomous checkout store in August 2018. And the company also signed several retail customers and is deploying for two already in multiple locations with scheduled go-live dates in Q3 and Q4 of this year. There are now hundreds of other retailers currently evaluating Standard’s technology.
“Traditional brick and mortar retailers are caught in a perfect storm. From the encroachment of behemoths like Amazon into every inch of the market to changing consumer attitudes, as busy people demand an ever more efficient shopping experience, margins are being squeezed like never before. The talented and driven Standard Cognition team have worked quickly to build a product that allows physical retailers, of all sizes, to tackle these challenges. A strong track record, super-smart technology and bold ambitions for future expansion make Standard Cognition an exciting investment for us, especially as we look to push forward with our ambition to help US companies break into Europe,” added Alastair Mitchell — a partner and investment advisor at EQT Ventures.
What distinguishes Standard’s technology from its competitors include its light footprint (makes it easy to retrofit existing stores and fit into any store layout), the scalable hardware and software, the commitment to not leveraging facial recognition or any biometrics (makes it simpler to comply with privacy regulations around the world), the frictionless experience provided for customers (with no turnstiles), and the deep data insights it can provide retailers (rivaling the data collected in e-commerce environments).
“Standard is far ahead of any other startup in this space. They are an extremely pragmatic team of world-class software engineers, and the pace of their innovation is accelerating as the team grows, extending their lead,” explained Garry Tan — the Managing Partner at Initialized Capital. “Standard is a genre-defining startup using AI and machine learning to bring the future of retail experience forward by years.”
Standard Cognition’s outside counsel for this round of funding was Covington and Burling LLP.
