Caper Closes $10M Series A Round

Caper announced it has secured $10 million in Series A funding, according to reports.

The round was led by Lux Capital, with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Hardware Club, FundersClub, Sidekick Fund and Red Apple Group. The company closed a $2.15 million seed round led by First Round earlier this year and has raised $13 million to date.

CEO and Co-founder Lindon Gao decided stores and shoppers needed carts that could turn a trip to the supermarket into a smart checkout experience.

“I realized if there were a way to improve grocery shopping, you could bring people back into stores who liked physical shopping, but hated things like standing in line or having to search the shelves for items,”   Gao said in a previous interview with PYMNTS.

The Caper cart functions like a regular shopping cart with some exceptions, including the fact that they are more durable than traditional carts. “We build these things to be tanks. You can kick them, crash them, abuse them and never make a dent,” Gao said.

In addition, the cart automatically checks out the items shoppers place inside them. Each cart is equipped with three cameras that take photos of each item, as well as weight sensors, a barcode scanner and a small screen.

This latest funding will be used to bring the company’s smart grocery carts to more locations.

“Instead of monitoring an entire store, we’re monitoring this very small cart. Our computation is faster, our cameras are a lot closer and we’re able to scale much faster because we don’t need to implement any infrastructure inside the store,” noted CTO and Co-founder York Yang.

While the company would not reveal the price of the carts, Yang revealed that a full rollout at a grocery store would “probably be within the hundreds of thousands range, though it could be less.”