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,........

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