Standard Cognition, which is eliminating the hassle of retail checkout by removing it entirely, announced today that it has raised a $5M seed round to accelerate its go-to-market for the first commercially available checkout-free AI shopping system. CRV (Charles River Ventures) led the round, with participation from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and several smaller firms and angels. Including this round, the company has raised $6M to date.

Standard Cognition announced the launch of its solution - an artificial intelligence-based system that lets consumers shop and pay without scanning or stopping to check out - in August 2017. An alternative to Amazon Go, the Standard Cognition platform is the first such solution available to any retailer, helping to reduce their labor costs, improve the customer experience, and increase profit margins by up to 100 percent.

The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch, and has been inundated with inbound interest from retailers of all sizes since the August launch. Standard Cognition plans to use the seed round funds to double its engineering team by the end of the year and launch its first public US store with a retailer in early 2018. It is already in talks with many US retailers about pilots.

Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, said he was attracted to Standard Cognition due to the team's technology prowess, and the speed with which they overcame obstacles that have vexed much larger competitors. "Instead of looking for incremental ways to improve cashierless checkout, the Standard Cognition team started from scratch and ultimately came up with a game-changing approach that allowed it to leapfrog much larger competitors and get to market much more quickly," said Yellurkar. "That caught our attention and got us excited to lead this investment."

Garry Tan, Cofounder and Managing Partner at Initialized Capital, said, "Realtime computer vision is entering a golden age where these time-honed techniques are now becoming highly practical and applied. That makes us very excited to invest in Standard Cognition - one of the most pragmatic, deeply technical teams tackling this space that we've seen in years."

Standard Cognition's founding team explored different markets to address with artificial intelligence, and found that retail was the ripest for this type of innovation. "Retailers are facing growing labor and retail costs and shrinking margins - especially those who are trying to compete with online behemoths such as Amazon," said Michael Suswal, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Standard Cognition. "We designed our platform to help retailers dramatically cut costs, get better analytics and insights, and improve the checkout experience for their customers, all of which improves their ability to compete."

Standard Cognition recently moved from Palo Alto to expanded headquarters in San Francisco's South Beach neighborhood. To learn more about Standard Cognition, visit www.standardcognition.com or email info@standardcognition.com.

About Standard Cognition
Standard Cognition is eliminating the hassle of retail checkout by removing it entirely. The company offers the only artificial intelligence-based system available to any retailer that lets consumers shop and pay without waiting in line, scanning or stopping to check out. The Standard Cognition solution helps retailers reduce labor costs, improve the customer experience, and improve profit margins by up to 100 percent. It's also helping retailers of all sizes compete with larger chains and online offerings such as Amazon. Learn more at www.standardcognition.com or follow @standardAI.