Simbe Robotics (HAX 07), the company leveraging robotics and AI to provide physical retail with unparalleled insights into inventory and operations, today announced two separate funding deals – a Series A equity financing round and an inventory financing agreement with SoftBank Robotics, allowing the company to increase efficiencies in production and deployment of Simbe’s Tally robot.

“The company’s proven technology and ROI is improving the bottom lines of well-known grocers and retailers on multiple continents. Now it’s time to scale Simbe’s data and hardware platform to revolutionize many more stores.”

The $26 million Series A was led by Venrock with participation from Future Shape, Valo Ventures, and Activant Capital. These top-tier investors have a deep understanding of the retail, robotics, and technology industries and will support Simbe with invaluable knowledge and guidance as the company begins a new phase of growth. The equity capital will go toward business operations including growing the team of world-class talent; scaling sales, marketing and customer success functions; and continued investment in R&D.

Simbe momentum

Founded in 2014, Simbe has emerged as the leading data-driven inventory solution for physical retailers, with Tally taking the lead as the first fully autonomous robot currently performing multiple store traversals per day – alongside customers during regular hours of operation – and executing a variety of inventory auditing tasks. Using both computer vision and RFID scanning technology, Tally provides retailers and their global CPG brand partners with actionable, e-commerce-level insights into shelf data up to three times per day.

Simbe’s actionable dataset paired with its AI-powered analysis ultimately enables retailers to protect profitability and increase efficiency, solving for the $1.75 trillion “ghost economy” defined by out of stocks, accurate price execution, and lack of product location optimization industry-wide. Simbe optimizes the grocery supply chain, enabling faster operational decisions at the store level and more nimble inventory management between retailers, brands, and logistics providers, and is ultimately building one of the most valuable datasets in the retail ecosystem.