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The Zippedi solution acquires real time inventory data from retail spaces. | Image credit: Zippedi

Zippedi, the Robotics as a Service (RaaS) retail digitizing platform company, today announced the close of $6.9 million Series Seed financing led by Grep VC. Grep VC is joined by the Chilean Venture Capital Funds CLIN and Alerce, as well as two renowned family offices from Chile and Colombia and GEN1 Capital based in Chicago.

Zippedi’s autonomous mobile robot (AMR) traverses aisle in a retail store and looks at every product. It can look at tens of thousands of different products and hundreds of thousands of individual products every day. Zippedi makes sure that every product is in stock, in the right place, and correctly labeled. This makes in person shoppers happier because they get everything they came to the store to get, and online shoppers are happier also because everything they order is delivered without omissions or substitutions. Happier shoppers are more loyal and will spend significantly more of their shopping dollars at the store that always comes through.

Demand for Zippedi’s AI-enabled Robotics capabilities has skyrocketed during the last 18 months in part due to Covid-19. The sharp rise of e-commerce has forced the industry to find better ways to manage out-of-stocks, product picking and placement, age old problems that can greatly be improved if the stores are digitized. Zippedi digitizes brick and mortar retail stores, enabling digital handling of the 51 billion physical products on the shelves of the North American retail industry. Zippedi is expected to increase revenue roughly 4x in 2021 and further accelerate in 2022.

The financing will enable Zippedi to continue providing best in class support and services for its fast growing and high-profile customer base. That includes one of the largest Home Improvement chains in the world as well as one of the most prominent last mile delivery companies. In addition, Zippedi will be advancing its technology and solutions around streamlining processes that without store digitization are impossible to achieve.

“We are thrilled to count on the support of savvy and knowledgeable investors who see the future of retail through our lens and have been relentlessly supporting us to bring our vision to life” said Luis Vera co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Zippedi. “Having worked many years with Image Recognition and AI to solve these problems in retail, I can confidently say that this technology, in the last 4 years, has finally reached enough maturity to create the level of accuracy and cost effectiveness to be a practical solution for the marketplace.

“Zippedi has a great Robotics as a Service (RaaS) business perfecting retail shopping both online and in person. This solves a $1 Trillion out of stock problem for retailers and last mile delivery services” said Paul Willard, Partner at Grep VC. “The robotics and machine technology they developed is very difficult to build and they are the only team in the world that can execute on this model, so Grep VC is very excited to invest in Zippedi.”