Grabango Raises $12M To Expand Product Development, Tech Deployments

Grabango, the Silicon Valley startup, announced Monday (Jan. 7) that it raised $12 million in venture funding.

In a press release, the startup, which makes checkout-free shopping technology for existing stores, said it raised the funding through a Series A financing round that was oversubscribed. The funding was led by Propel Venture Partners with investment participation from Ridge Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Commerce Ventures and Founders Fund. Ryan Gilbert, a general partner at Propel, will get a seat on the Grabango board.

With the latest round of fundraising, Grabango said in the press release that it has raised $18 million in funding. The company said the funding will go to boost its product development team and expand the deployment of its technology in more stores.

“Our goal is to forever change the way people interact with things. As Arthur C. Clarke taught us, advanced technology can be implemented so well that it feels like magic,” said Will Glaser, Grabango’s founder and CEO, in prepared remarks. “We don’t want to be the center of attention, but rather for our systems to work so smoothly in the background they are completely taken for granted.”

Glaser, the co-founder and chief technology officer at Pandora Radio, rolled out Grabango in 2016 to save people time when shopping in stores. The service, which is free to use, doesn’t require a smartphone. Rather, computer vision and machine learning systems keep a virtual shopping basket for each person who visits the store, and checkout is automatic. There is no need for stores to have a barcode scanning tool or for cashiers to scan products as customers leave the store.

Grabango noted that the latest round of fundraising builds on accomplishments that include signing on four major store chains in the U.S., initiating store deployments ranging from 2,500 to 50,000 square feet per location, filing 17 patents and growing its team to 37 employers and contractors.

“Grabango hits the target for brick-and-mortar retailers aiming to deliver a smoother shopper experience and a better bottom line. We’ve looked at all the checkout-free technology providers, and Grabango is the only true enterprise scale provider in the market today,” said Gilbert of Propel.