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 Task Rabbit CEO Stacy 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 paym