smart-retail

(4)
Company
Bell Resources
Climate · Ai · Hardware

Bell Resources

Bell Resources is building AI-powered Roadside Hubs that fold ultra-fast EV charging, automated car washing, clean energy and smart retail into a single connected stop.

ev-charging · ultra-fast-chargingRead →
Company
JumpStart Indonesia
Hardware · Consumer · Ai

JumpStart Indonesia

JumpStart Indonesia is a Jakarta-based automated retail company that operates the country's largest network of smart, AI-enabled vending machines. Founded in 2018 by CEO Brian Imawan as a single self-serve coffee machine, it has grown into a broad smart-retail platform - coffee bars, snack and merchandise vending, beverage-capsule dispensers, ice cream and gamified machines - with more than 6,500 units across Indonesia. The machines run on cashless, contactless payments and use software to track sales and manage stock, positioning JumpStart as a distribution channel connecting global brands, especially from Japan, with Indonesian consumers.

vending-machine · smart-vendingRead →
Legend
Yili Wu
Founder · Executive · Operator

Yili Wu

Yili Wu is the founder and CEO of SandStar (formerly YI Tunnel), a computer-vision company that turns ordinary shops, shelves and vending machines into checkout-free, self-analyzing retail. A first-generation graduate of Tsinghua University's School of Software, he spent roughly eight years selling enterprise software at Oracle and IBM before betting that brick-and-mortar retail could be digitized the way e-commerce already had been. He founded the company in 2016, sold his first big contracts top-down to Fortune 500 headquarters in the US and Europe, and grew SandStar into a business operating across a dozen countries with dual bases in Beijing and Charlotte, North Carolina.

yili-wu · sandstarRead →
Legend
João Diogo Falcão
Founder · Executive · Engineer

João Diogo Falcão

João Diogo 'JD' Falcão is the CEO and co-founder of AiFi Inc., the San Francisco-based company building the world's largest autonomous retail network. A PhD from Carnegie Mellon and Master's from Cornell in Robotics, JD spent years shaping AiFi's core technology as CTO before stepping up as Chief Executive in September 2025. Under his and the team's leadership, AiFi has deployed 300+ camera-only autonomous stores globally, processes over 90 petabytes of spatial data annually, and counts Microsoft, ALDI, and 7-Eleven among its partners. His central thesis: the physical world deserves to be as queryable as the internet.

ceo · co-founderRead →