Exclusive: AI grocery startup Vori raises $22 million to help independent retailers compete with Walmart and Amazon
Brandon Hill’s parents met and fell in love in an independent grocery store. Decades later, the startup founder is trying to make sure stores like that don’t get swallowed up by Walmart and Amazon.
Hill is the cofounder and CEO of Vori, a San Francisco company building “the self-driving operating system for supermarkets.” The company has raised a $22 million Series B led by Cherryrock Capital—led by former TaskRabbit CEO Tracy Brown-Phillbot—Fortune learned exclusively. Greylock Partners and The Factory—Stanford AI researcher Chris Ré’s fund—also participated.
The capital will be used to bring AI to an industry that still runs, in many cases, on fax machines, paper invoices, and a patchwork of point-of-sale, inventory, ordering, loyalty, and payments tools. The new round follows a $10 million Series A in 2022 led by The Factory.
Vori’s pitch is that the grocery industry isn’t stagnant. It’s just highly fragmented and dynamic. The U.S. food retail market—supermarkets, grocery stores, food marts, and specialty shops—is worth $1.5 trillion, trumping that of restaurants and hotels. And there are 45,575 U.S. supermarkets, with average weekly sales of $711,806 per store. Walmart and Amazon, however, control a quarter of the U.S. grocery market, and both have invested heavily in the space, most notably with Amazon’s $13.7 billion Whole Foods acquisition. Vori is pitching itself to the 75% of operators outside that big-box orbit.
Hill’s a third-generation grocer. His grandparents ran a small store in Oklahoma, his parents spent their careers in grocery, and his mother now works at Vori. Hill says the idea for Vori started in 2020, when he was visiting his parents in Minnesota and saw a stack of paper invoices and wholesale catalogs. “I looked at these books, and I said, ‘Okay, what is this? a relic or a souvenir from you guys when you guys were my age?’” Hill told Fortune. “And they said, ‘No, this is how grocery stores operate here in 2020.’”
Vori’s software processes payments, tracks inventory, reads supplier invoices, adjusts shelf prices, creates purchase orders, and helps grocers decide whether to reorder oranges, milk, bok choy, or barbecue sauce before customers walk out empty-handed. That matters in a business where independent grocers are still fighting 39% store-level turnover.
Since launching in January 2024, Vori says it has processed more than $500 million in payments across 55 cities and served more than 1 million consumers. Payments account for roughly 60% to 70% of revenue, according to Hill, a model he says helps keep software and hardware costs lower for stores that already pay payment processors.
Brown-Philpot (who started her VC firm in 2023 after selling TaskRabbit and working with SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund) said the grocery industry has been underinvested in because it’s complex. “The number of SKUs in a grocery store is an order of magnitude higher than that of a restaurant,” she told Fortune. “You can’t just copy the code that quickly.” Hill says grocery stores can carry 50,000 to 100,000 individual products, and that some Vori customers do $100,000 in sales per day in one location.
Hill is careful to frame the automation pitch as less robots replacing grocery employees than owners getting their nights back. “It’s not about eliminating jobs,” he said. “It’s about, how do you fill gaps so you don’t have to spend 60 to 70 percent of your time moving data from left to right?”
Hill says the company expects to grow sevenfold in 2026 and again in 2027. His bigger ambition is to build the infrastructure layer for the rest of grocery, before the industry’s future is defined only by Amazon and Walmart.
“We need to protect the heterogeneity and the biodiversity of our food ecosystem,” Hill said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com