Vori announced a $22 million Series B funding round led by Cherryrock Capital, with participation from Greylock Partners and The Factory, including Stanford AI researcher Chris Ré.
The company is building an operating system designed to manage a grocery store’s entire operations. It handles checkout and payments at the register, tracks every item on shelves, places orders with wholesalers, sets prices and runs promotions.
In the past six months, Vori has doubled payment volume, with new stores being onboarded every 24 hours. Since launching in January 2024, Vori has processed more than $500 million in payments across 55 cities, serving some 1 million consumers nationwide.
U.S. food retail – supermarkets, grocery stores, food marts and specialty shops – is a $1.5 trillion market, bigger than restaurants and hotels.
Walmart and Amazon have invested heavily in this space, capturing 25 percent of U.S. grocery spending. But no one is building technology for the other 75 percent of the market, for the operators still running on tools from 40 years ago.
Three systems in one platform
At the core of Vori is a unified system that brings together all of the disparate components required to run a store.
The system of record tracks all activity happening in the store in one place: every sale at the register, case in the back room and price on shelves, as well as every order placed with a wholesaler and all loyalty members.
Today this lives across a point-of-sale system, separate inventory and ordering systems, as well as a loyalty app and stack of paper invoices.
The system of action is where artificial agents leverage what the store knows to do the work. When dairy runs low, Vori writes the purchase order and sends it to the wholesaler.
When a heat wave hits, Vori cuts the price of ice cream, updates every shelf tag in the store and reports the sales lift back to the owner that night.
The system of transaction processes every dollar that flows through the store. Payments represent about 60 percent of Vori’s revenue, with support for EBT, WIC, HSA and FSA, each requiring complex, state-by-state integrations.
Every additional store on Vori makes the others smarter. A strategic pricing move that works for owners in Sacramento shows up the next morning as a recommendation in Tampa.
By the end of 2026, the work that today eats a store owner’s nights and weekends – counting inventory, calling in orders, hand-keying price changes, reconciling invoices against deliveries – will run on its own.
Over time, the company aims to become the clearinghouse for trade across the global food supply chain, connecting stores, distributors, brands and payment systems into a single network.
Third-generation grocer at the helm
Brandon Hill, Vori co-founder and CEO, said the industry has reached a turning point.
“My family has been in grocery for three generations, and for most of that time the answer to ‘how do we run this store better’ was simply ‘work harder,'” Hill said. “That no longer works. Grocery stores require what seems like never-ending decisions and adjustments to be made every second of the day just to stay running.
“With AI now making it possible to automate all operations, the cost of inaction is now existential. We plan to be the platform that powers the industry-wide rebuild of the systems that run grocery.”
Hill is a third-generation grocer – his grandparents were in the industry, his parents met in a supermarket and his mother works at Vori.
Vori is led by a team with deep roots in grocery and engineers from SpaceX, Stripe, Square, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Amazon.
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