Grabango – BP’s Choice for Automated Checkouts

BP goes Cashierless

It has been three years since the first Amazon Go opened in 2018. Cashierless technology is no longer mysterious to the customers. Amazon plays no more solo in the market. Many Startups have caught up and grabbed their own share.

Recently BP announced the partnership with Grabango to offer a checkout-free experience to their customers. It will start testing the technology with 10 locations of its convenience stores in middle 2022.

Lisa Blalock, Vice President of Marketing, Mobility & Convenience Americas for bp, commented, “We are always looking for innovative solutions that bring a more seamless experience to our customers. We believe this technology will positively change the scale of retail and create a wave reaction in the marketplace. Today it’s just our first 10 locations. Tomorrow, there is potential to bring Grabango’s technology to our entire network”

So why did BP, America’s largest energy investor, choose Grabango as their Partner?

Who is Grabango?

Grabango introduces itself as the leading provider of checkout-free technology for existing, large-scale store chains.

It was founded by Will Glaser, who previously co-founded the music streaming service, Pandora, in 2016.

Grabango raised $12 million in a Series A financing round in 2019. In the same year, Giant Eagle announced Checkout-Free Technology Partnership with Grabango.

Giant Eagle is one of the nation’s largest food, fuel, and pharmacy retailers with approximately $8.9 billion in annual sales.

In 2021, Grabango raised another $39 million in Series B funding to scale up its technology.

Till today, it has filed over 30 patents and becomes a strong competitor for Amazon’s JustWalkOut technology.

Grabango vs. JustWalkOut

Most of the industry put their focus on the solutions for smaller, stand-alone convenience stores.

Will Glaser, the CEO of Grabango, once reviewed Amazon’s JWO system, “Amazon Go/JWO chose to drastically narrow the domain by constraining the store environment to the point where their tech would work. The Just-Walk-Out stores have a small number of SKUs that turnover very rarely and are carefully placed in just the right position on special scales.

Even minor rearrangements could cause accuracy to plummet.”

On the other hand, Grabango aims for existing, large-scale chains. Its system places no limits on who can enter the store, what can be sold there, or how the shelving is configured.

Across all stores, which have partnered with Grabango, none have ever closed for installation or maintenance. Grabango’s revenue accuracy is presently 99.6. It is a far better accuracy than POS systems.

Throughout the years, Cashierless technology is continuously evolving. We are still at the beginning of the industry change. The study from Juniper Research reported, “the value of transactions processed by smart checkout technologies, where the fixed checkout process is replaced by a frictionless model, will reach $387 billion in 2025, up from just $2 billion in 2020.” We foresee an exciting future of the market revolution.