grocery
(16)
Mama's Creations
The only publicly traded company built entirely around the deli case turned a grandmother's Sunday sauce into a $171 million bet on the least glamorous corner of the grocery store.
Giant Food
For 90 years Giant Food has run the same play in the same four zip-code clusters: know the Beltway shopper better than anyone from out of town ever could.
Dollar General
Dollar General is one of the largest discount retailers in the United States, operating more than 21,000 small-box stores that sell everyday essentials - food, cleaning supplies, health and beauty aids, paper products, apparel and seasonal goods - at low price points. Founded in 1939 in Tennessee, the company built its business by placing convenient, value-focused stores in small towns and rural communities that larger chains often overlook, and roughly 75% of the U.S. population lives within five miles of a Dollar General store.
Walmart
Walmart is the world's largest retailer by revenue, operating a global network of supercenters, discount stores, neighborhood markets, Sam's Club warehouse clubs and a fast-growing e-commerce business. Founded in 1962 by Sam Walton in Rogers, Arkansas, the company built its scale on an 'everyday low prices' model powered by a highly efficient supply chain. Today it blends roughly 10,500 stores worldwide with digital commerce, retail advertising, a growing marketplace and AI-driven shopping tools, serving hundreds of millions of customers each week while employing about 2.1 million people.
Omnistream
Omnistream is an AI-powered category-management platform that helps retailers build consumer-centric, store-level planograms in minutes. Founded in 2018 by former quant trader Wendy Chen, the company integrates a retailer's sales and product data to generate assortment and shelf-space recommendations tuned to each store's local demand. Its software is deployed across 8,500+ retail locations in convenience, grocery and health & beauty, serving names like 7-Eleven, Watsons and FairPrice, and reports incremental sales gains of roughly 4-11% alongside sharp reductions in waste.
Forage
Forage is a San Francisco payments company that makes it easy for retailers and online platforms to accept government benefits like SNAP EBT, WIC, and HSA/FSA. It is one of only a handful of third-party processors approved by the USDA to handle online EBT, pairing a unified merchant API with hands-on certification support. On the consumer side, its Forage app helps low-income families check their EBT balance, find discounts, and earn rewards. The technology runs at more than 100,000 stores across all 50 states, including Dollar General, Save A Lot, Gopuff, DoorDash, and Uber Eats.
Homesome
Homesome is an AI-first grocery commerce (g-commerce) platform that helps independent and regional grocers compete online. It packages a branded website, a unified mobile app, AI-driven personalization and search, a pick-and-pack fulfillment app, and a headless API suite into one system that plugs into a store's existing POS and loyalty programs. Founded by former Microsoft engineer Rahul Chabukswar, the company pivoted from running its own grocery-delivery service to powering the digital storefronts of chains like Strack & Van Til, Erewhon, Caputo's and Berkot's Super Foods.
Public Goods
Public Goods is a New York-based, membership-driven direct-to-consumer brand that sells its own line of healthy, sustainable everyday essentials - personal care, household, cleaning, grocery, and supplements - at near-wholesale prices. Pitched by co-founder Morgan Hirsh as 'Amazon with a soul,' the company launched on Kickstarter in 2017, built a single house brand with minimalist design and clean ingredients, and ties purchases to reforestation and food-bank donations.
Raz Golan
Raz Golan is the CEO and co-founder of Shopic, a Tel Aviv-based retail technology company that makes a clip-on device that snaps onto standard grocery carts and turns them into AI-powered smart carts. A veteran of Israel's Unit 8200 and a former Check Point security researcher, Golan started Shopic in 2015 with Eran Kravitz and Dan Bendler after concluding that big supermarkets did not need a new cart - they needed a small computer that could ride along on the one they already owned.
Axiom Cloud
Axiom Cloud builds AI software that makes commercial refrigeration systems cheaper to run, easier to maintain, and dramatically less polluting. Its cloud platform plugs into existing refrigeration controllers at grocery stores and cold-storage facilities to spot refrigerant leaks early, shift energy use off-peak, and automate work orders - cutting both costs and the climate impact of supermarket cooling.
Vori
Vori is a San Francisco-based SaaS company building the all-in-one operating system for independent grocery stores. Their platform, VoriOS, combines AI-powered point-of-sale, inventory management, automated ordering, pricing automation, loyalty programs, and back-office analytics into a single system — giving independent grocers the same technological leverage that Walmart and Amazon use against them. Founded in 2019 by a third-generation grocer and Stanford/Cornell engineers with backgrounds at SpaceX, Lyft, and Stripe, Vori has processed over $500 million in payments across 140+ stores in 55+ cities, and raised $50 million total including a $22M Series B in May 2026.
Jason Potter
Jason Potter is the President and CEO of Grocery Outlet, the Emeryville-based bargain grocery chain known for its independent owner-operator model and treasure-hunt aisles. He took the top job on February 3, 2025, after nearly five years steering The Fresh Market and 26 years climbing through Sobeys, Canada's national grocery giant. He started bagging groceries at 13 in a small Alberta town and has been in the trade ever since.
Foodsmart
Foodsmart (formerly Zipongo) is a San Francisco-based telenutrition company that pairs registered dietitians with a food benefits marketplace to treat diet-related chronic disease and food insecurity. It serves more than 2.2 million members across employer plans, Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage and commercial insurers, and in 2024 raised $200M led by TPG's The Rise Fund to expand its 'Foodscripts' food-as-medicine programs with major U.S. health systems.
Matt Schwartz
Matt Schwartz is the CEO and co-founder of Afresh, a San Francisco-based AI company building the operating system for fresh food in grocery retail. A Stanford MBA alumnus with a lifelong obsession with food systems, he co-founded Afresh in 2017 after discovering that billion-dollar grocery chains were still managing produce orders with paper and pen. Under his leadership, Afresh has raised $181.8M in total funding, deployed across 12,500+ departments in 40 states, and prevented more than 200 million pounds of food waste - serving major chains including Albertsons, Meijer, and Wakefern.
Amrit Robbins
Amrit Robbins is the CEO and co-founder of Axiom Cloud, a San Jose-based AI-powered refrigeration management software company serving grocery chains and cold storage operators. A Stanford-trained engineer and Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus, Robbins previously co-founded Axiom Exergy — a hardware-first thermal energy storage company — before pivoting to software in 2020 with Axiom Cloud. His work addresses refrigerant leaks, which rank #4 on Project Drawdown's climate impact list, with a platform that requires no new hardware, deploys remotely, and earns payback in under a year.
Brandon Hill
Brandon Hill is the co-founder and CEO of Vori, a San Francisco-based B2B operating system for the grocery industry. A Stanford graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Hill grew up surrounded by grocery — his grandparents ran a small store in Oklahoma and his parents spent 40+ years in the industry. He channeled that heritage into Vori, which he co-founded in 2019 with Tre Kirkman and Robert Pinkerton to modernize the technology stack powering America's independent and regional supermarkets. Vori's AI-powered platform, VoriOS, handles point-of-sale, inventory, pricing, supplier integration, and back-office operations for 140+ stores across 55+ cities, having processed over $500 million in payments. The company raised a $22M Series B in May 2026, bringing total funding to over $32M.