Smart grocery cart doubles as a personal shopper

Veeve, founded by former Amazon and Google employees, want to bring the Amazon Go concept to the level of shopping carts

Spotted: Startup Veeve is building a shopping cart that will handle grocery store checkouts automatically. The company was founded by former Amazon and Google employees who wanted to bring the Amazon Go concept to the level of the shopping cart.

Currently, automated “just-walk-out” stores like Amazon Go rely on arrays of ceiling-mounted cameras to recognise products and automatically add them to the customers’ bill. Veeve’s system would simplify this process by building all the necessary technology into shopping carts. The cart is armed with sensors and machine vision which recognises products as they are placed in the cart and adds them to the bill. A built-in scale measures and calculates the cost of produce and can determine when an item is removed, and update the bill.

The cart also comes equipped with a screen that can act as a personal shopper, providing directions around the store and suggestions for items that are on sale. It also has a barcode scanner, in case an item is not picked up by the computer vision. When it’s time to leave, customers swipe their credit card and simply walk out of the store.

Veeve co-founder Shariq Siddiqui has said that the cashier-less tech offers stores an opportunity to, “redefine the entire shopping experience — not just checkout,” by offering retailers, an “inexpensive yet scalable solution that can deploy quickly without making significant changes to the store infrastructure.” The system is already live in a Seattle-area grocery store in the Seattle region, and the company is getting ready for a bigger rollout.

Veeve joins a large number of similar products that aim to provide stores with turnkey systems for just-walk-out checkout. Start-ups like Swiftly, Ava Retail, Standard Cognition, Vcognition Technologies, Grabango, AiFi, Caper and Trigo are all developing cashier-less technology. At Springwise, we have recently covered both autonomous shopping carts and digital shopping carts.