While Amazon Go pioneered the completely touchless store concept, others like 7-Eleven and Walmart have entered this territory. The area is growing, in part because several startups – similar to Standard Cognition, Zippin, AiFi, Grabango, Trigo – have expanded to supply their technologies to retailers.

But in Europe, a Portuguese startup Sensei is developing a contactless store platform and has now secured a €15 million Series A funding round led by BlueCrow Capital. New investors Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and Kamay Ventures (the investment arm of Coca-Cola and Arcor Group), in addition to existing investors Metro AG and Techstars Ventures, also participated in the meeting.

In 2021, based in Lisbon Sensei raised a seed round value $6.5 million (€5.4 million). Then he managed the financing Just like these ventures AND The capital of Iberiswith participation from 200M fund.

The startup currently plans to create 1,000 fully autonomous sales points by 2026. It already serves clients in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Brazil, and plans to expand into Central and Northern Europe.

Using computer vision, AI-powered sensors and real-time algorithms, the Sensei system mechanically updates the shopper’s basket and displays a listing of things ready for payment, with identity and privacy protected.

Touchless stores reduce checkout costs, prevent out-of-stocks and provide retailers with real-time visibility into store operations.

During the decision, Vasco Portugal, CEO and co-founder of Sensei, said: “We are growing, especially in the last year, we have almost doubled the number of stores. So we opened stores in a short time. We are now present in five locations.”

“There are two problems in the retail industry. The customer experience sucks. Second, it is extremely difficult to process all sales information in real time. It’s really about shop automation, like automotive automation and factory automation. I believe it is a natural change,” he added.

António de Mello Campello, partner at BlueCrow Capital, added in an announcement: “Artificial intelligence… is transforming several industries and we believe that retail represents one of the biggest opportunities and will soon be disrupted. Sensei has proven to be one of the best in the industry.”

Taking all this into consideration, competition in space is big.

Standard Cognition raised $239.4 million, Wheat $199 million, Grabango $93.8 million, AiFi $87.1 million and Zippin $44 million.

Ro co-founder and CEO Zachariah Reitano said that while he’s “never saying never” on potentially taking the 7-year-old telehealth company public, he believes the benefits of being a private company are increasing.

Reitano dodged many questions from Axios reporter Dan Primack about whether the company was planning an initial public offering in the near future – or in any respect – at Axios’ BFD event on Oct. 22.

“I may give an unsatisfactory answer, but the truth is that right now we are solely focused on providing the highest quality product to our patients,” Reitano said.

Ro has raised over $1 billion in enterprise capital from corporations equivalent to General Catalyst, Initialized Capital and Torch Capital, amongst others. Ro recently raised $150 million in a round led by ShawSpring Partners that valued the company at about $6.6 billion.

Reitano’s views are likely shared by other late-stage startup founders as venture-backed corporations proceed to remain private longer, based on PitchBook data. Another factor keeping corporations private is the growth of the secondary market as an increasingly common solution to provide investors and employees with some liquidity – although most of the activity is concentrated in a few corporations.

He also talked about the company’s big “uncomfortable bet” on weight reduction drugs, which became available on the platform in 2023. Ro was founded in 2017 by Rob Schutz, Saman Rahmanian and Reitano as a telehealth company focused on erectile dysfunction. The company has expanded into more men’s and ladies’s health categories, including hair growth, fertility and skin health. But now it has grow to be well referred to as a provider of many GLP-1 options.

Reitano said the company began working on a program to supply such drugs in 2021 and transferred a significant percentage of its inventory to this category at the moment. This is currently one of the fastest growing sectors of its activity.

“Providers want patients to have it, and patients desperately want it. “Things like this have never happened before in any drug category, so from our perspective, widespread and widespread use of GLP-1 is inevitable,” Reitano said.

He added that expansion was natural for the company at the time because conditions like obesity impact many of the other health categories the company focuses on, including fertility and sexual conditions like erectile dysfunction.