INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
As Amazon looks to increasingly expand its cashier-less grocery stories — called Amazon Go & across different regions, there at least one
startup hoping to end up everywhere else beyond Amazon empire.Standard Cognition aims to help businesses create that kind of checkout
experience based on machine vision, using image recognition to figure out that a specific person is picking up and walking out the door with
The company said it raised an additional $5.5 million in a round in what the company is calling a seed round extension from CRV
The play here is, like many startups, to create something that a massive company is going after — like image recognition for cashier-less
checkouts — for the long tail businesses rather than locking them into a single ecosystem.Standard Cognition works with security cameras
that have a bit more power than typical cameras to identify people that walk into a store
Those customers use an app, and the camera identifies everything they are carrying and bills them as they exit the store
The company has said it works to anonymize that data, so there isn&t any kind of product tracking that might chase you around the Internet
that you might find on other platforms.&The platform is built at this point & we are now focused on releasing the platform to each retail
partner that signs on with us,&Michael Suswal, Co-founder and COO said
&Most of the surprises coming our way come from learning about how each retailer prefers to run their operations and store experiences
They are all a little different and require us to be flexible with how we deploy.&It a toolkit that makes sense for both larger and smaller
retailers, especially as the actual technology to install cameras or other devices that can get high-quality video or have more processing
power goes down over time
Baking that into smaller retailers or mom-and-pop stores could help them get more foot traffic or make it easier to keep tabs on what kind
of inventory is most popular or selling out more quickly
It offers an opportunity to have an added layer of data about how their store works, which could be increasingly important over time as
something like Amazon looks to start taking over the grocery experience with stores like Amazon Go or its massive acquisition of Whole
Foods.&While we save no personal data in the cloud, and the system is built for privacy (no facial recognition among other safety features
that come with being a non-cloud solution), we do use the internet for a couple of things,& Suswal said
&One of those things is to update our models and push them fleet wide
It is light and allows us to make updates to models and add new features
We refer to it as the Tesla model, inspired by the way a driver can have a new feature when they wake up in the morning
We are also able to offer cross-store analytics to the retailer using the cloud, but no personal data is ever stored there.&It thanks to
advances in machine learning — and the frameworks and hardware that support it — that have made this kind of technology easier to build
Already there are other companies that look to be third-party providers for popular applications like voice recognition (think SoundHound)
or machine vision (think Clarifai)
All of those aim to be an option outside of whatever options larger companies might have like Alexa
It also means there is probably going to be a land grab and that there will be other interpretations of what the cashier-less checkout
experience looks like, but Standard Cognition is hoping it&ll be able to get into enough stores to be an actual challenger to Amazon Go.
