Make Shopping Magic with AI-powered Carts

A journey to the future of grocery shopping

The race to draw shoppers attention back to brick and mortar stores has begun; Amazon Go entered the grocery industry – opening the door to combining the best of both worlds. The question grocers are (and should be) asking is “What can we do to improve our customers' shopping experience?” And the answer comes in many forms, most of which are an expensive and unreasonable risk to their business (e.g., installing cameras and sensors throughout a store, at the bare minimum).

After extensive research to understand the major pain points experienced during the shopping journey, we started our company, Caper, with one mission – help brick and mortar retail thrive by enhancing the in-store experience. Busy checkout lines, difficult product location, and a lack of information on promotions and deals are issues that divert people's attention away from local grocery stores to online shopping. With all the needs of customers and the constraints of grocers in mind, we launched our first product and built a solution that brings a seamless retail experience and doesn’t require significant store overhaul: the Caper Smart Shopping Cart.

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When we decided to materialize this dream, we wanted to make it a reality not only for customers but also for supermarket owners. That’s why we created a plug-and-play solution that doesn’t require complicated installation or operational restructuring. Get it, turn it on, and you’re ready to go! That's it. Really. As the first AI-powered shopping cart, our smart technology identities items as soon as they are tossed into the cart, helps shoppers find the exact location of the products they are looking for, all while allowing them to ultimately skip the checkout line.

It’s been an exciting journey from day one to see the Caper carts live in two stores in New York – we expect to roll out to 150 more during 2019. With the current version (that includes all the perks customers already love), shoppers simply scan the barcode before adding products to their cart. As customers shop, we collect and label images to help train Caper’s deep learning algorithm and enable the scan-less item identification experience that we will be launching within the upcoming year.

Our technology has already helped grocers to increase the average basket size by 18%, and we know Caper is a game-changing and scalable solution that is evolving the way consumers shop for groceries. We are honored and grateful that our vision is backed by First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Hardware Club, FundersClub, Sidekick Fund, Precursor Ventures, Cogito Ventures, Redo Ventures, and notable angels in the grocery and retail industry such as Max Mullen, Cofounder of Instacart; Nick Taranto, Cofounder of Plated; and Jenny Fleiss, CEO of Jetblack.

It’s all about the shopping experience; pushing the boundaries of the status quo. Consumers want more, and it's time we give it to them. Welcome to the future of grocery shopping. Let’s make shopping magic.

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