Raz
Golan.

Raz Golan runs a company that sells supermarkets a small computer. The computer clips onto a shopping cart. When you touch the cart, the computer wakes up. When you drop a jar of olives into the basket, the computer sees the olives, notes the olives, and quietly adds them to a running tally that will, at the end of your trip, become the receipt you never actually stop moving to receive. When you put the olives back, the computer notices that too. This is Shopic, and Golan has been building it since 2015.

The thing that makes Shopic mildly heretical, at least by the standards of a decade of retail-tech decks, is that it does not ask the store to change. It does not ask you to download an app, register a card, walk under a canopy of cameras, or sign up for anything. It does not, notably, ask the store to buy new carts. The cart is the cart. Everything else is software wearing a plastic shell. Golan is fond of noting, whenever a reporter asks him about Amazon Go, that he is not building a store, he is building a device. It is a small distinction until you try to sell to a supermarket chain, at which point it is the only distinction that matters.

Golan came to grocery by way of adversaries. He served in Unit 8200, the Israeli signals-intelligence corps that has become a sort of unofficial preparatory school for the country's software industry. From there he went to Check Point, the cybersecurity company, where he worked as a security researcher, and where he met the two men who would eventually become his co-founders, Eran Kravitz and Dan Bendler. Before Shopic he co-founded a company called Semanix, briefly, as VP of product. He studied at the Ruppin Academic Center. In interviews he tends not to dwell on any of this, which is either humility or good instinct - the retail buyer does not particularly care where you came from, only whether the device works.

The device does work, mostly, and the fact that it does is the result of a pivot that Golan will happily describe if you ask. Shopic's first product was a scan-and-go app - shopper takes phone, phone reads barcode, phone forms basket. This is a beautiful product in a slide deck and a slightly less beautiful product on a Tuesday at a real supermarket, where the shopper is holding a phone in one hand, a jar in the other, and a toddler in the third hand they do not have. Large supermarket chains, Golan has said, wanted something less demanding of the shopper. So Shopic pivoted to computer vision. Instead of asking the shopper to scan, the cart would look. Golan has told this story often enough that it has the practiced flatness of a founder anecdote that once represented an existential crisis, and now represents a chapter title.

The chapter after that is the one where Qualcomm Ventures led a $35 million Series B in the summer of 2022 and Shopic began to move into the United States. A subsequent $10 million took the running total past $57 million. The company reports that its carts lift monthly shopper spend by as much as eight percent at deployed stores, that self-checkout fraud detection sits above 94 percent, and that it has processed hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions. Numbers like these are best read as directional rather than deposited-in-the-bank certain, but the directionality is what matters. Retail runs on thin margins and thick complaints, and directional is often what buyers can pay for.

What is unusual about Golan, or at least distinct within a founder cohort that tends to gravitate toward either evangelism or grievance, is the doggedness with which he refuses to overclaim. Physical stores are not going away, he told Calcalist. But the way people shop, he added, has to change. This is a very Israeli formulation - a hedge and a promise, delivered in the same breath, from someone who has spent enough time in a warehouse aisle to have opinions but not enough patience for slogans. The retail future Golan is selling is not a spaceship. It is a slightly more informed cart.