Vori raises $22M to bring Walmart-grade automation to independent grocery stores, hitting $500M in payments

Speaker 1: like a respected journalist in the room or something. I don't know. There there's a bunch of ways. But this this debate will continue going back and forth with people understanding and debating the capabilities of this technology. But we can come back to that in the future because our next guest is in The way we're We have Brandon Hill from Vory, the CEO. I kinda like that. How are doing, Brandon?

Speaker 2: What's going on?

Speaker 1: Hey. Welcome to the show. Guys. Thanks for having me. We gotta ask you. What's your stance on whispering in the office? Have you heard this? All the AI employees, all the startup employees are whispering into their computers to give commands to clog code and codex. Are you in favor of having your office feel like a sales floor, or would you like a quiet library like environment?

Speaker 12: I mean, ABC always be closing. Right? Like whether you're closing PRs, whether you're closing deals. We want Kinesis on I the love I

Speaker 1: love it. We yeah. I I agree with you. I think every it's unanimous used to

Speaker 4: it. It.

Speaker 1: But we're not here to talk about whispering your computer or screaming at it. We're here to talk about your company. So please give us an introduction on yourself and Vory.

Speaker 12: Yeah. Absolutely, guys. Thanks for having me. Name is Brandon Hill. Yeah. I am the CEO and cofounder of Vory. I'm actually a third generation grocer, just to give you my story.

Speaker 1: That's amazing.

Speaker 12: Yeah. My grandparents were in grocery. Cool. My parents met and fell in love in a grocery store

Speaker 1: Woah.

Speaker 12: And have been in the industry for over forty years.

Speaker 2: That's amazing. I

Speaker 12: went to Stanford University. That's where I met my two co founders who are two of my best friends. Yeah. Worked at Google with Trey. Rob was a aerospace engineer at SpaceX under Elon, and then self driving cars at Lyft. And we're building the operating system,

Speaker 1: a

Speaker 12: self driving operating system for supermarkets Okay. Where they basically help them make more money Yeah. And operate more autonomously because, as you know, grocery is a paper and pencil industry. Yeah. But it's also 1 and a half trillion dollars of the American economy.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So are you starting with back office ERP inventory management accounting, Or are you going to try and replace those automated checkout machines that everyone knows barely work even though they've been around for decades? It feels like there's opportunity in both. How quickly do you want to focus?

Speaker 12: Well, you know what's interesting is we found that the alpha is really in automating everything before checkout

Speaker 3: Okay.

Speaker 12: And after checkout.

Speaker 1: I can imagine.

Speaker 12: As you know, there's a bunch of companies that raised hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do the just walk out Amazon model. Yeah. The unintuitive thing is or what we were surprised by is it actually turns out building inventory, automating pricing

Speaker 5: Sure.

Speaker 12: Helping grocery stores market their products to their customers Yeah. Everything before and after is really where the that's where the economics are, and that's where the grocery stores have the most need and willing to spend money. Yeah. So that's what we do. We happen to have a a sleek modern checkout on the front end. Yeah. But it's about connecting everything in the store end to end.

Speaker 1: Okay. Automating pricing in a store, there's, you know, the price of oil is going up. There's inflation. There's all sorts of different prices that are changing all day long. The price of milk fluctuates day to day. You mentioned a pencil and page paper and pencil industry. I imagine that at some point, a store manager gets a spreadsheet or an email or some sort of notification that a price needs to be changed, and then they have to print out a new label. Is that how it works? And then how will it work in the future?

Speaker 12: So there's the old way and the new way.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 12: In the old world, imagine a a supermarket which has a 100,000 products. Whereas a grocery store, you know, a restaurant might have 50, a 100 menu items. Grocery store has 50, a 100,000 SKUs. Yeah. They're accepting dozens of payment types.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 12: Right? They have hundreds of employees. Yeah. And they might do more in sales than a restaurant or like a donut shop or a coffee shop might do in a month or a year

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 12: In terms of overall volume. Yeah. So the complexity of solving the problem is really hard. Now today, what they're the state of the art, if you could believe it, is you have a pricing coordinator

Speaker 8: Mhmm.

Speaker 12: Like named Judy. She has her bifocals on. Mhmm. She receives an invoice from the supplier. Mhmm. She's looking at it with her bare eyeballs, going through line by line with a ruler and highlighter to figure out if milk and bok choy and ketchup and cereal have gotten more expensive today versus last week. She finds the price change and has to go type it into her ERP system, like the back office system, and hope that that reflects accurately at the POS. Yeah. It's a 12 step process. Vory does it in one click. So our pricing agent reads all the incoming invoices from all of the hundreds of wholesale suppliers that a supermarket is using. Mhmm. It detects when there's changes in cost, which, of course, there always are due to inflation and supply chain issues, and then automatically changes the price across 30,000, 50,000, a 100,000 items in real time. So

Speaker 1: I I the the the changing of the price at the checkout actually seems like the easy part because when I'm in a grocery store, I feel like a lot of the prices are printed, and they're and they're labeled right on the shelves. Is there a move towards, like e ink displays or LCD displays that could be, updated in the cloud in the future? Is that an important, like, step along the road to, like, automating the price setting of of grocery stores?

Speaker 12: Oh, it's critical. In fact, I got a couple right here. Oh, no way. Yeah. Electronic shelf labels. Right? This is the future. Okay. Walmart actually just spent a billion dollars rolling out electronic shelf labels across every single item, across every single of their 4,600 stores.

Speaker 1: That'd be so much sense.

Speaker 12: But the thesis behind Vory is we're we do that today

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 12: For all of our customers. Yeah. And we're taking like that Walmart and Amazon level technology

Speaker 1: I'm bringing it

Speaker 12: and rolling it down market to other 75 of the trillion and a half dollar food and beverage retail market.

Speaker 1: I didn't realize it was that fractured. I would have guessed

Speaker 3: Do grocery stores

Speaker 1: doing, like, 70% of all grocery or something.

Speaker 2: Do do some of these smaller grocery stores or I guess the full stack end up selling products at a loss accidentally sometimes because they get a price change and then

Speaker 1: It didn't get rolled out

Speaker 3: fast fast.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Didn't roll it out and then they're just like losing money on an item. Is that is that a thing?

Speaker 12: It happens all the time. So Dylan. Right? Dylan from TBPN. So Dylan, I was going back and forth with him on X yesterday, and so his favorite shop is Mill Valley Market. Mhmm. Okay? Up in Mill Valley. Love that store. It's beautiful. That's powered by Lori. Okay. Before we went in that store, and Ryan, the owner, will tell you, yes, they were mispricing items here and there, and they were losing margin. We go in, we find five points of gross margin sitting on the table with our and give it back to them, put it back in their pockets with our automated Take it

Speaker 2: of our pocket.

Speaker 3: Take it

Speaker 1: out of Dylan's pocket and put

Speaker 2: it in the store

Speaker 1: owner's pocket. I like that. Hey,

Speaker 12: I'm pro competition. I'm pro America. That means I'm pro small business. Right? Just trying to help them succeed.

Speaker 1: No. No. Was good. Fine. But yeah, it's it's funny to frame it that way.

Speaker 2: The price of bok choy is going up.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Good luck, Dale. Get ready to get ready to pay through the nose for your bok choy. Tell us about the round. How much did you raise? What happened?

Speaker 12: Yes. So we raised $22,000,000 to you. We raised 22,000,000 to invest really in our go to market. We've been expanding rapidly. We've done over $500,000,000 Wow. In payments Wow. Which is where 60% of our revenue comes from. Mhmm. We're investing behind that, advancing our product, releasing more agents for the store to do more work to help them be more competitive against big big box stores

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 12: And investing behind our deployment team to help install this hardware and software and complex payment system into more grocery stores across the country. So we're super excited.

Speaker 1: That's amazing. Well, congrats. Seems really smart. And unique market too. Very unique Hard to

Speaker 2: compete with you having probably done all of these different jobs Yeah. At at different points Yep. Yourself back in the day.

Speaker 1: Generational success. I love to see it. There you go. Have a great rest of your day.