An Israeli deep-tech company is bolting a computer-vision brain onto ordinary shopping carts - and turning the grocery aisle into one of retail's richest, and least understood, sources of data.
The shopping cart has stayed roughly the same for eight decades: a metal basket on wheels. Shopic's bet is that the cheapest way to modernize a store is not to rebuild it, but to upgrade the one thing every shopper already pushes down the aisle. The company builds a clip-on device that attaches to a standard cart, watches the basket with a camera, and uses computer-vision models to recognize each item the moment it drops in.
For the shopper, the experience is close to invisible. A touchscreen on the handle shows a running total, applies promotions in context, and lets customers bag as they go and check out without unloading onto a belt. A shopper in Germany described it plainly: the cart simply chimes and shows what was added.
For the retailer, the same camera doing the scanning becomes an instrument. Shopic's platform reads what enters the cart, where the cart travels, and which shelves get attention - data that physical stores have historically lacked and that e-commerce takes for granted. The company frames its work as digitalizing the retail floor and bridging the gap between online and in-store commerce.
The founding team came from cybersecurity, not grocery. Raz Golan and Eran Kravitz transitioned from security engineering to retail, and that lineage shows in how the product treats the store: as a system with blind spots, shrink, and fraud to be seen and defended in real time. That framing eventually produced a dedicated loss-prevention product built on the same vision stack.
What sets the approach apart is restraint on infrastructure. There are no ceiling arrays of sensors, no wholesale cart replacement, and no special store network required - the recognition runs at the edge, on the cart itself. That keeps deployment cost low and shortens the path to a return, which matters enormously to grocers running on thin margins.
An AI-enabled clip-on device on a standard cart detects items by computer vision, displays a live running total, and enables scan-and-go checkout with no belt and no line.
Real-time item-level recognition and behavior analysis at self-checkout and other touchpoints - catching scan errors, shrink and fraud with over 90% detection and under 5% false positives.
A live dashboard for shelf visibility, inventory tracking, shopper path analysis, heat maps and planogram compliance - the data physical stores never had.
Context-aware promotions on the cart screen at the moment of decision, opening an offline retail-media revenue stream for grocers.
Grocery runs on two chronic pains: shoppers hate waiting in line, and stores hate losing money to shrink and blind spots. Shopic aims the same camera at both. The scan-and-go flow removes the checkout bottleneck, while the loss-prevention layer watches self-checkout without treating every customer as a suspect.
The reported field numbers below come from Shopic's own deployment data. They point to a deliberate design goal - accuracy high enough to be trusted by staff, and false-positive rates low enough that the system does not annoy honest shoppers into leaving.
Figures are company-reported deployment results and should be read as approximate.
"From loss prevention to shopper behavior - Shopic Vision sees it all."
Shopic's customers are grocery and supermarket chains, and through them, everyday shoppers. Its flagship is Shufersal, Israel's largest supermarket chain, which is both an investor and the site of a 2,000-plus cart deployment. That partnership won the 2023 RETA Award for Best AI at EuroShop. Beyond Israel, the smart cart has rolled out with Walmart Chile, been piloted by Intermarche in France, and reached Italian shelves through PAC 2000A Conad and through Dimar's Mercato stores with integration partner Retex.
The competitive field is crowded - Instacart's Caper, Amazon's Dash Cart, Veeve, Imagr and full cashierless-store vendors like Trigo all chase the same frictionless future. Most either require purpose-built carts or blanket a store with sensors. Shopic's differentiator is the clip-on: it upgrades the carts a retailer already owns, doing its AI inference on the device rather than on the ceiling. In a business where deployment cost decides who scales, the mounting bracket is close to the whole strategy.
| Round | Amount | When | Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed / early | ~$11M | 2015-2020 | IBI Tech Fund, Tal Ventures, Claridge Israel, Shufersal |
| Series A extension | $10M | 2021 | Claridge Israel, IBI Tech Fund, Tal Ventures, Shufersal |
| Series B | $35M | Aug 2022 | Qualcomm Ventures (lead), Vintage, Clal Insurance, Shufersal |
Total raised roughly $56M. Early-round figures are approximate.
Cybersecurity veterans Raz Golan and Eran Kravitz launch Shopic to digitalize the retail floor.
Computer vision recognizes items as they enter a standard cart.
Fresh funding aimed at the world's largest grocery chains.
Total funding reaches roughly $56M with a push toward U.S. grocers.
The Shufersal deployment of 2,000+ carts earns industry recognition.
Intermarche begins testing Shopic carts in France.
A dedicated vision loss-prevention product launches alongside Conad, Dimar and Retex partnerships.
CEO and co-founder. A former cybersecurity engineer who now leads Shopic's push to bring vision AI to grocery chains worldwide.
CTO and co-founder. Architect of the computer-vision and edge-computing stack that runs on every cart.
Leadership also includes a CFO, Chief Strategy, Operations, Revenue and Product officers. Team size ~82.
Shopic makes an AI-powered clip-on device that turns a standard shopping cart into a smart cart, using computer vision to recognize items in real time for frictionless checkout, in-cart promotions, loss prevention and store analytics.
Shopic was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv by Raz Golan (CEO) and Eran Kravitz (CTO), who came from cybersecurity backgrounds.
Roughly $56M, including a $35M Series B in 2022 led by Qualcomm Ventures with Vintage Investment Partners, Clal Insurance, Shufersal and others.
Deployments include Shufersal in Israel (2,000+ carts), Walmart Chile, Intermarche in France, and PAC 2000A Conad and Dimar in Italy.
Shopic's device clips onto carts a store already owns rather than requiring new carts or ceiling-mounted store-wide sensors, lowering deployment cost and speeding ROI.