Instacart announced yesterday that it has installed Caper Countertop cashierless checkout systems at Boston’s Fenway Park (Instacart bought Caper Labs last year). The new tech will be available in three locations and is being done in partnership with Aramark Sports + Entertainment, which provides food and beverage to nin Major League Baseball stadiums.

Listen, I’m a huge believer in cashierless checkout at stadiums and arenas. It lets people buy stuff faster and get back to their seats without missing any action. I just don’t think Caper’s cashierless tech is necessarily the best solution out there for stadiums.

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The News

• Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology is now powering two cashierless checkout stores at Minute Maid Park, where the Houston Astros play Major League Baseball.

• Fans shopping at the stores insert their credit card upon walking in, grab the snacks, sodas, etc. that they want, and then leave, getting charged automatically.

• Stadiums will be a big market for cashierless checkout. Though Amazon is the 800 lbs gorilla in the space, there are plenty of smaller startups with the technology chops to put up a challenging fight for stadium installations.

The Story

Two of the best use cases for cashierless checkout are airports and sporting venues because both feature high-volumes of people who want to grab food and drinks quickly. Thus, the fiercest battles between cashierless checkout companies will be fought over floorspace at airports and stadiums.

Typically, the news of Amazon moving into a particular vertical sends shockwaves through that industry (see: Amazon buying Whole Foods). But success and dominance are not guaranteed for Amazon in the sporting event space.

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The News

• Amazon announced yesterday that it has opened a new Whole Foods in Sherman Oaks, California that features the company’s Just Walk Out cashierless checkout.

• This is the second Whole Foods to get Just Walk Out, following the tech’s launch at a Washington D.C. location earlier this year.

• The new store launch comes as other cashierless checkout stores are raising funds and rolling out new locations aggressively.

The Story

We’ve known that Amazon was going to open this second cashierless checkout Whole Foods location in Los Angeles for awhile now. The questions now are — how are consumers adopting the technology and how many Whole Foods will get cashierless checkout.

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You don’t normally expect Saturday Night Live to come up during a video chat with a startup founder, but that’s exactly what happened when I spoke with AiFi CEO Steve Gu this week.

He was referencing the Amazon Go "Just Walk Out” parody that ran on this past weekend’s episode. The skit is more about racial inequality than cashierless checkout technology, but for Gu, the fact that such a skit appeared at all on a popular show like SNL meant something even more.

“You get a sense that it's entering into mainstream if it's on SNL,” Gu said, “People these days are getting more familiar about the concept.”

That means Gu and other CEOs in the cashierless space can spend less time explaining the concept of autonomous stores to retailers, and spend more time signing those retailers up as clients.

AiFi made headlines at the end of last week when it announced a $65 million Series B fundraise. I took the opportunity to catch up with Gu, who told me about AiFi’s new investors, new verticals its entering and new features coming down the pike.

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The News

• AiFi, which makes a computer vision-based cashierless checkout system for retailers, announced today that it has raised a $65 million Series B round of funding.

• The investors are a mix of retailers and technology companies including ALDI South Group, Żabka Group, REWE, Verizon Ventures, HP Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by AiFi to $97 million.

• AiFi powers 26 autonomous stores already in operation around the world. Its new funding comes at a time when retailers are primed for cashierless checkout (and Amazon has not cemented any dominance).

The Story

While $65 million is a big number, the thing I’m most intrigued about with AiFi’s funding announcement today is who the investors are. Just as much as it is about money, this round is also about strategic relationships with both retail partners (and potential AiFi customers), as well as technology partners that can power AiFi’s autonomous stores.

The funding comes at a time when Amazon, the 800 lbs. gorilla in the cashierless checkout line, has had its share of hiccups, allowing upstarts like AiFi to potentially swoop in.

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This post is an OttOmate Quick Bite, a small story based on a newsy topic that is open to all readers and meant to spark conversation. Get the full guide to the future of food automation by becoming an OttOmate subscriber today!

As it encroaches into more parts of our lives, it’s often easy to forget that even the mighty mighty Amazon stumbles from time to time (we’re looking at you, Fire phone).

I don’t want to call Amazon’s different forays into cashierless checkout stumbles, exactly. That feels too harsh. Amazon is basically the godfather of the “Just Walk Out” technology, and the first one on the beach takes all the bullets.

But Business Insider posted a story yesterday based on a leaked internal Amazon memo that outlined how its smart Dash Carts are falling short of expectations (sub required). That got me thinking about how well the company’s different takes on cashierless checkout are faring, four years after the first Amazon Go store launched to the public.

The Good

• Amazon has expanded the capabilities of its camera-based cashierless checkout beyond convenience stores and into larger supermarkets like Amazon Fresh.

• Select Whole Foods are supposed to get the Just Walk Out technology starting this year.

• This week, WHSmith opened its first Amazon-powered cashierless checkout store at LaGuardia, this follows a similar Amazon-powered store launched by Hudson at Dallas Love airport last year.

• Amazon Go stores are headed outside of city centers and out into the suburbs with a new store format.

• Strabucks opened up an Amazon Go-powered store-within-a-store last year, and plans to open two more this year.

The Not-so-Good

• Per that Business Insider story, Amazon’s smart Dash Carts, which automatically keep track of items you put in them, were only being used in 10 - 15 percent of total shopping sessions as of August last year (short the company’s 30 percent goal).

• According to BI, some problems attributed to Dash Cart’s sluggish adoption include its small size (called it!), slow item scanning — and the fact you can’t take it outside to your car(!).

• Even Amazon’s camera-based system isn’t without its flaws. Last year we wrote about how it can take hours for customers to receive their digital receipt after they’re shopping trip.

To be clear, I do not think the sky is falling for Amazon. But I am saying that both the smart shopping cart and camera-based cashierless checkout sectors are teeming with upstarts ready to pounce. Let’s name a few:

Smart Carts

• Instacart, which acquired Caper Labs last year.

• Veeve

• Imagr

• SuperSmart

• Shopic

• Nomitri (though technically that service just uses your phone, which is attached to the cart)

• WalkOut

Computer Vision Checkout

• Grabango

• AiFi

• Zippin

• Accel Robotics

• Standard AI

• Mashgin

• Trigo

• Sensei

Retailers are already reluctant to give Amazon — their biggest competitor — more money and data. There are plenty of cashierless startups champing at the bit to provide an alternative. Having technology that doesn’t work or scale quite right is an unforced error Amazon shouldn’t be making.

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The News

• MAPCO announced today that two of its Nashville, Tennessee convenience store locations will be outfitted with Grabango’s cashierless checkout technology this fall.

• Users download the Grabango mobile app, shop as they normally would and then bypass the checkout line by scanning a special QR code on their phones.

• Grabango CEO Will Glaser told OttOmate this week that convenience stores have moved from curiosity about cashierless checkout to launching multi-store pilots.

The Story

The first big wave of cashierless checkout adoption is starting small. MPACO is the latest convenience store chain to jump into cashierless world with today’s Grabango announcement. Though the pilot will start at two undisclosed locations in Tennessee, MAPCO has 330 stores across the U.S. Southeast, so if the pilots work out, Grabango could be across a number of Southern states next year.

For its part, Grabango is getting pretty good at signing up C-store chains across the country.

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The News

Fraîche, which makes a smart fridge for offices to provide fresh food, announced today that it has raised a new $2 million round of Seed funding. Pascal Rigo (La Boulange), Jean Moueix (Petrus Winery), Bruno & Julien Caron (Norac, Bakerly), and the Newlab all participated. This brings the total amount raised by Fraîche to $3 million.

Fraîche’s smart fridges are installed in offices and provide a curated selection of food and beverages. Users download the Fraîche app to set up an account and record their face (which is used to unlock the fridge). Customer then take what they want from the fridge and scan it to get charged. Employers are able to subsidize as much or as little of the meal as they like.

The new capital will go towards hiring and expanding its presence in New York City. In today’s press announcement, Fraîche said it plans to be in 30 new locations over the next nine months, and is targeting 100 locations in 2023.

Why This Matters

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The News

Energy giant bp will retrofit ten of its locations with Grabango’s cashierless checkout technology, the two companies announced today. Seven ampm stations in Northern California and three Amoco locations in Western Pennsylvania will be the first to integrate the new checkout system starting in mid-2022.

Grabango makes a camera/computer vision based checkout system for retailers. Customers download the Grabango app prior to entering the store. Once inside, they shop as they normally would with Grabango’s cameras and AI keeping track. Once done, Grabango creates a special code that is scanned on a Grabango device as shoppers exit the store, charging shoppers automatically and providing a receipt.

This could be just the tip of the iceberg for bp and Grabango. In today’s press announcement, a bp rep said “there is potential to bring Grabango’stechnology to our entire network.”

Why This Matters

Let’s unpack this a little more.

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Zippin announced today that it has brought its grab-n-go cashierless checkout tech to stores to the John F. Kennedy Internationl Airport in New York City and the Tom Jobim International Airport (“Galeão”), in Rio de Janeiro. These are the first autonomous stores for each of these airports.

Zippin partnered with SSP America to launch Camden Food Express, an cashierless store now open in Terminal 4 of JFK. Customers tap their credit card upon entering the store and once inside, cameras and weight sensors and artificial intelligence keep track of what items are taken by each shopper. Customers then just walk out and get charged automatically.

At the same time on the other side of the equator, Zippin worked with Ame Digital, Americanas S.A.’s fintech and mobile business platform, to open the Ame Go store in the domestic boarding area of the Galeão airport. (Lojas Americanas S.A. is also an investor in Zippin.)

Worth noting is that the JFK store is open after the security check, and the Galeão store is open before the security check. Both stores have been open for a week and Zippin Co-Founder and CEO Krishna Motukuri told me during an interview this week that they’ve already seen some differences in shopping patterns. Because the JFK store is only accessible to travelers, most shoppers are buying food and drinks. The Galeão store is open to everyone, and shoppers there are buying travel essentials and is being used by airport employees.

Both stores are opening at a… well, interesting time for air travel. On one hand, vaccination boosters and the availability of vaccines for kids ages 5 - 11 certainly opens up the possibility of travel for a lot of people who have stayed put for twenty months. However, the recent rise and spread of the Omicron COVID variant has cast a pall over the holiday travel season, once again raising questions about health and safety.

Sadly, now is actually a good time for autonomous retail technology like Zippin’s. The pandemic, in part, has been a big reason that autonomous checkout has been such a big story this year. “COVID has been a major factor in accelerating the adoption of the technology,” Krishna Motukuri, Co-Founder and CEO of Zippin told me during an interview this week.

Cashierless checkout stores can reduce human-to-human contact (no cashiers), and remove the need to stand in line — so shoppers aren’t congregating and can get in and out of the store much faster.

Airports in particular, with their high-volume of people who want to buy items quickly, are perfect locations for cashierless retail. “As things are opening up, transit hubs are realizing that as people are coming back, there is still quite a bit of PTSD around COVID,” Motukuri said.

Zippin isn’t alone in opening autonomous stores at airports. Earlier this year Amazon partnered with airport stalwart Hudson News to launch an Amazon Go-powered Hudson Nostop store at the Dallas Love Field Airport in March of this year.

Zippin, however, isn’t going to let Amazon steamroll their way to dominance in the cashierless checkout space. With more than 40 stores open around the world, Zippin says that it is the only autonomous retail startup to rival Amazon.

And Zippin, which raised $30 million in September, is ready to hit the gas in 2022. The company says that roughly 100 Zippin-powered stores will open up in train stations and airports next year, and almost 100 Zippin stores are planned to open in stadiums (another high-traffic, need-for-speed locale) in the U.S. in the next six months.

“Mainstream adoption is already happening in a way that most people didn't think of when they first started learning about autonomous stores,” Motukuri said, “In their mind they had a convenience store with one casheir and then no cashier. But it is eliminatig friction — not the elimination of cashiers — that is the primary draw.”

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Nomitri announced today that its smartphone-based cashierless checkout system is now available for shoppers at the Edeka center LÜNING Rietberg, in Rietberg Germany. This is the first public retail partnership for Nomitri.

Customers just need to have a LÜNING card and download the Nomitri mobile app (and be at least 18 years old). The shopper places their phone in a special holder installed on the cart (with the camera facing down into the cart) and launches the Nomitri app. Items are placed in front of the phone camera where Nomitri scans the barcode to keep a tally of what’s put in the cart. The app also has computer vision to see if anything extra has been placed in the cart without scanning it first, to prevent theft. Once shopping is done, Nomitri adds up the bill and creates a barcode that is presented at a special checkout area where the customer is automatically charged.

There are similar mobile phone-based scan-n-go type checkout solutions on the market from Skip and 7-Eleven. But the bigger hook with Nomitri is all the artificial intelligence brains it packs on the mobile device itself. Because it runs all of that computer vision and everything else on the app on the phone, a store doesn’t need to add any computing power on-site, Nomitri does not need network connectivity to work, and privacy is kept because video data doesn’t leave the device.

While there are a number of cashierless checkout solutions coming to market, Nomitri’s approach could be appealing to retailers because it doesn’t require much effort to get started. Unlike Grabango or Zippin or Trigo (which is working with REWE stores in Germany), Nomitri doesn’t require the rerofitting and installation of cameras and sensors in the store. And unlike smart cart solutions from players like Caper and Veeve, Nomitri only requires a phone holder be installed on existing carts. The tradeoff with this lightweight approach, however, is that Nomitri does require the shopper to do more “work” by scanning each item individually, instead of creating a true walk-in-grab-what-you-want-and-go experience.

The entire cashierless checkout space got a little bit of a boost this Fall when Instacart acquired Caper Labs for $350 million. With its huge network of retail partners, Instacart now has the ability to nudge cashierless checkout into more grocery stores across the country.

On a more dour note, adoption of cashierless checkout could accelerate as we go through more waves of the COVID pandemic. Retailers looking to protect both employees and shoppers by reducing human-to-human interaction could find these contactless, cashierless retail experiences more appealing.

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GetChkd’s CEO Michael Caplovitz has a big, yet specific, vision for his company. As he explained to me by video chat this week, Caplovitz wants people to be able to pay for a beer and pizza in Texas, then hop on a plane and fly to Paris where they buy another pint and pizza — all with just a wave of their hand.

What he’s talking about, and GetChkd is creating, is sort of a universal verification, payment and loyalty system, powered by biometrics and blockchain technology. To boil it down, you would verify your identity (and age) and connect that information to a piece of biometric data (Caplovitz likes vein pattern recognition in your hand). Throw in a payment system and Bob’s yer uncle. GetChkd is building the underlying architecture and using existing off-the-shelf verification and payment processing tools (Jumio, Trueface, Stripe, etc.).

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Grabbing a six-pack and some Slim Jims just got easier for residents of Tucson, Arizona, as Grabango’s cashierless checkout technology is now available at six Circle Ks in the southwestern city.

Grabango announced the news today, saying it was working with Circle K and its parent company Alimentation Couche-Tard on the rollout.

To use the system, customers download the Grabango app to their mobile device. Once in the Circle K they shop as the normally would, with Grabango’s system of cameras and AI keeping track of what is taken. Upon leaving, customers skip the checkout line and scan the Grabango app on special device which charges them automatically.

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This is the second high-profile retail partnership for Grabango, which has also been working with Giant Eagle GetGo stores in the Pittsburgh area.

What’s most intriguing about this announcement is how Circle K appears to be publicly piloting a number of different cashierless checkout solutions. Last August, Circle K announced it was testing out cashierless checkout with Standard Cognition in Phoenix, Arizona (not that far from Tucson, geographically speaking).

Also in August of last year, Mastercard announced its ShopAnywhere initiative to help its retail network adopt cashierless checkout. At the time, Mastercard said it was working with Accel Robotics as its cashierless checkout provider and that Circle K was already lined up as a ShopAnywhere customer.

The cashierless checkout market is still very new and there are a ton of startups vying for retail partners. A big chain like Circle K choosing just one technology could have a material impact as all these cashierless startups try to get more funding to scale up their operations.

If you’re in the Tucson area and want to, errr, checkout Grabango’s cashierless checkout, it’s now available at the following locations:

• 15935 N. Oracle Road in Tucson

• 11403 W. Tangerine Road in Marana

• 3880 W. Tangerine Road in Marana

• 5725 W. Ina Road in Marana

• 4540 W. Ina Road in Marana

• 5633 W. Cortaro Road in Marana

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Grocery delivery service Instacart announced today that it has acquired cashierless checkout startup Caper for $350 million in cash and stock. Not a bad return for a company that only raised $13 million.

Caper’s mainly known for making smart shopping carts that enable cashierless checkout. Caper’s smart carts have cameras, weight sensors and a big touchscreen that automatically keep track of what shoppers put in. Customers can then skip the checkout line, paying via the cart as they exit the store.

Caper also makes a countertop cashierless checkout system for convenience stores, but when it comes to the Instacart acquisition, we’re more interested in the carts. Why? Because now when you use a Caper smart cart — you become an unpaid gig worker for Instacart. (Congratulations!)

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Listen, I know this is two times in the span of one week that I’ve covered cashierless checkout. More specifically, this makes two times over the past week I’ve covered Amazon’s cashierless checkout. But this morning, Amazon made the announcement industry watchers have been waiting for — that the company’s Just Walk Out cashierless checkout is finally headed for Whole Foods Market.

Starting next year (Amazon wasn’t more specific with the timing), two Whole Foods locations in Sherman Oaks, California and Washington, D.C.’s Glover Park neighborhood will be outfitted with the cameras, shelf sensors computer vision and AI to enable cashierless checkout. As Amazon is fond of saying, customer can walk in, grab what they want and just walk out.

Industry watchers like myself have been waiting for this announcement because it’s another milestone that proves Amazon’s cashierless checkout can scale. Right now the technology is predominately used at smaller Amazon Go-sized stores, though it is also being used at one full-sized Amazon Fresh supermarket in Bellevue, Washington.

The question remains, however, whether Amazon’s computer vision-based cashierless checkout is truly ready to scale to full-sized stores. That question only became more germaine when Amazon admitted last week that it can take hours for a customer using just walk out technology to receive their receipt.

Not seconds. Not minutes. Hours.

That, is ridiculous. As I noted last week, waiting hours for a receipt is a horrible customer experience. The whole point of frictionless, cashierless checkout is speed. If I use Just Walk Out, I should get my receipt by the time I’m done loading my car, not after I get home, put my groceries away and am halfway through an episode of Hacks. I, the customer, should not have to wonder — for hours — whether or not I was charged properly.

The silver lining to Amazon’s announcement today is that the new cashierless stores don’t open until next year. Which means Amazon has time to shrink the lag time with its receipts.

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Bloomberg brought receipts

Bloomberg’s Matt Day recently went shopping at the Amazon Fresh store up here in Bellevue, Washington. Big deal, you might think, so a reporter went grocery shopping.

Au contraire! Amazon Fresh is different from other supermarkets because like Amazon’s Go Stores, the Fresh market offers cashierless checkout. Scan your phone’s Prime App as you walk in, grab what you want and scan again as you leave, getting charged automatically when you leave the store.

But unlike Amazon Go stores, Amazon Freshes are a lot bigger. Go stores are typically between 1,700 - 2,500 sq. ft. and Amazon Fresh is 25,000 sq. ft. Size matters in this case because there have been questions around how much Amazon’s (and other startup’s) cashierless checkout systems can scale. The company’s “Just Walk Out” technology uses a combination of cameras, computer vision, shelf sensors and AI to keep track of what shoppers pick up.

A small convenience-sized store doesn’t have that many products or shoppers to keep track of at any given moment. But a full-sized grocery store, with thousands of SKUs and a lot more customers actively shopping at any given time, is another matter entirely. The bigger the store, the more complex the whole situation becomes and the more technology you need to install to make cashierless checkout work.

So what stood out most to me in Bloomberg’s story was this graph:

A few hours after I left, the receipt for my items arrived by email. That’s different than my experience at the pocket-sized Amazon Go convenience stores in Seattle, which tend to send a receipt a few minutes after you walk out. People familiar with the Just Walk Out technology say delays can be an indication that footage was flagged for human review to make sure the software correctly logged what was taken off the shelf. An Amazon spokesperson declined to explain the delay, and said shoppers across stores using Just Walk Out technology receive receipts within a few hours. [Emphasis mine]

I was surprised that Amazon was that blasé about a receipt taking that long to be received. I even confirmed with Day that Amazon’s response wasn’t a typo (it wasn’t).

An hour, let alone hour-urz is a loooong time to wait for a receipt. Especially for a new type of autonomous shopping experience people are unfamiliar with, and one where you don’t interact with anyone as you leave the store.

The first time you experience cashierless checkout, it feels a little like shoplifting. No one stops you as you grab a handful of candy and leave. It’s the perfect crime! But that illicit thrill immediately turns to a little bit of concern the longer you wait for your receipt: Did Amazon accurately see which items I got? Did I get charged the right amount? And, why am I eating so much candy?

Confirmation speed is actually important for cashierless checkout to gain mainstream acceptance. The last thing you want is to grab your goods, get back home or to the office only to learn Amazon’s AI goofed. At that point, do you just let it go and assume Jeff Bezos has absconded with your money into orbit?

When I first spoke with autonomous retail startup AiFi CEO, Steve Gu, back in October of 2019, real-time receipts was his big pitch. At the time, he said AiFi’s technology produced receipts in 200 milliseconds (for convenience sized stores). I’m no Time Lord, but 200 milliseconds is a lot faster than a couple of hours, and I’d rather know sooner than later that Amazon is charging me properly.

And speed will be important for the success of cashierless checkout. The pandemic has helped fuel interest in autonomous retail because it removes one layer of human-to-human interaction/transmission, and it keeps strangers from congregating in checkout lines. These are good things in our COVID era! With its first-mover advantage and massive reach, Amazon is in a unique position to drive adoption — and equally as important — trust in cashierlss checkout.

But you can’t trust an experience that makes you wait an hour or two for confirmation.

With the amount of money Amazon is spending to build out its network of cashierless checkout stores, it wants your trust (and your money) as well. Shrinking the delta between when you leave the store and when you get your receipt will go a long way towards building both.

Feed Us Ex Machina

With the news out of the way, I can officially welcome you to the pre-launch, sneak-peek of OttOmate, your friendly guide to the future of food automation and robotics! This week’s issue is meant to give everyone an amuse-bouche of what the actual newsletter will look like when it goes fully live on September 10.

The best way to think about OttOmate is to think of Swedish music producers. Specifically think of hitmakers like Denniz Pop and Max Martin who strove to “cut out the boring parts” when making songs to get right to the hook.

OttOmate should hook you in and entertain you as it is making you smarter about robots, and it shouldn’t take longer to read than your average pop song. So, here’s what you can expect from OttOmate going forward.

A daily story. This is for everyone, including free subscribers, posted on the OttOmate.news website and emailed to free subs at the end of each week. It’ll be a brief bit of news along with why it’s important.

Weekly newsletter. This is for paid subscribers only. Each newsletter will include:

• 1 - 2 bigger stories that highlight and analyze a particular trend in food automation

• Early access to the podcast, which will feature Q&As with execs from across the food automation landscape

• Headlines with links to stories I think you’ll appreciate

• A fun kicker that has nothing to do with robotics at all

NOTE: This particular sneak-peek newsletter doesn’t have the podcast because I’m sending it out to everyone. The OttOmate podcast will start appearing next week (9/10).

Got an idea to make OttOmate better? Send me a note! OttOmate is just me, so I can try lots of different things.

Got a pitch? If you’re with a food automation startup or a PR firm representing one (see our full coverage areas here), drop me a line! I’m always on the lookout for news and podcast guests.

Like what you read? Consider signing up for a paid subscription. It’s the main way we can keep the lights on. Check out our subscription plans.

Want merch? We got OttOmate shirts and hoodies.

Thanks for checking this issue out! I appreciate your time and hope you’ll stick around!

Skål!

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Headlines

• AxleHire to scale Tortoise and URB-E zero-emissions delivery solutions nationally (TechCrunch) - The last-mile logistics startup will deploy 100+ of Tortoise’s remote-controlled delivery robots.

• Los Angeles International Airport Rolls Out NomNom, a Semi-Autonomous Food Delivery Robot (The Spoon) - Indoor food delivery via robots in large spaces like airports will arrive much faster than on public roads.

• AI-powered weed destroying startup harvests $27M round, farmers say laser-blasting machine saves time and cuts pesticide use (Geekwire) - Seattle-based Carbon Robotics is kinda similar to Small Robot Company, which uses electricity to autonomously zap weeds.

• Nuro to create ‘tens of thousands of autonomous delivery vehicles’ (The Engineer) - The autonomous delivery vehicle company is spending $40M on a production facility in southern Nevada that will employ 250 people.

Speaking of employment…

Per Scholas Helps Tech Companies Hire Diverse Talent

A big question looming over food robotics and automation is the loss of jobs for human workers. It’s a big complicated issue that we will definitely delve into in later issues. But from the outset of launching OttOmate, I didn’t want to just talk about jobs for people, I wanted to try and do something about it.

So I’m collaborating with a non-profit called Per Scholas, whose mission is to “to open doors to technology careers for individuals from often overlooked communities.”

If food automation is indeed creating newer and better tech-related jobs, then Per Scholas can help companies fill those jobs.

Per Scholas believes a thriving workforce starts with equitable access to education and career opportunities. For more than 25 years, it has provided individuals often excluded from tech careers with skills training, and access to employers. In 2021, Per Scholas will enroll more than 3,000 learners across seventeen cities, including Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Atlanta, placing them in jobs among our 500 corporate partners including Google, Spotify and Capital One.

Companies looking to build their tech teams can visit https://perscholas.org/business/ to learn more.

(Charity Navigator gives Per Scholas four stars)

No-Bot, human-powered recommendations

As noted earlier, at the end of each issue of OttOmate, each week we’ll provide a non-robot-related recommendation for y’all to enjoy.

Since we already brought up pop music, I’m recommending “Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson” on Apple TV+. Yes, it’s on Apple TV+, but you already signed up to watch “Ted Lasso” (I’m a season 2 stan, fight me). While you’re there, check out Ronson’s docu-series on different aspects of song making.

As the name spells out, “Watch the Sound” features super producer Mark Ronson delving deep into different facets of music like auto-tune, distortion, sampling, synthesizers and more — all while talking in a wait-does-he-have-a-British-accent?

The show is informative, entertaining, filled with good music and sometimes mindblowing (the Reverb episode in particular). So go. Watch the Sound.

Did you enjoy this sneak peek at OttOmate? If so, there are two ways you can help!

First, you can forward this issue to a colleague.

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Or, even better, become a subscriber to get the full experience.

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“You have to listen to the notes she’s not playing.” - Lisa Simpson admiring a musician at The Jazz Hole

“Pffft. I could do that at home.” - The showgoer next to her

Cahierless checkout startup Zippin announced a $30 million fundraise today, bringing the total amount of money it has raised to $45 million. For those who keep track of such things, the fresh capital is from new and existing investors including OurCrowd, Maven Ventures, Evolv Ventures and SAP.

But what interests me more is what Zippin didn’t say in today’s announcement. Mainly, how did its equity crowdfunding campaign, launched just a few months back in May, play into this fundraise? UPDATE: Zippin CEO Krishna Motokuri emailed me to say that yes, the crowdfunding is included in this Series B.

At the time of that crowdfunding announcement, Zippin said it was in the middle of raising this Series B, which included OurCrowd, the online platform where Zippin ran its equity crowdfunding campaign, as an investor.

If you are interested in the future of autonomous stores/cashierless checkout, be sure to subscribe to the OttOmate newsletter!

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In today’s official fundraise announcement, Zippin didn’t mention its crowdfunding campaign specifically, only OurCrowd. Zippin aimed to raise $8.4 million through equity crowdfunding, and according to its OurCrowd listing, that campaign was fully funded.

So what I don’t know is if that $8.4 million was part of the Series B, or if Zippin is counting both the investment from OurCrowd the company, as well as the money it crowdfunded through OurCrowd.

I sent a note to Zippin CEO Krishna Motukuri for clarification, and will update as I hear back.

Equity crowdfunding has been particularly popular with food automation startups, with companies like Miso Robotics, Small Robot Company, and Blendid all running such campaigns. One big reason they do is for marketing. Through crowdfunding, startups can get a small army of evangelists who then go out and spread the gospel for whatever product is being built.

At the end of the day, the whole question of what role equity crowdfunding palyed probably doesn’t matter. Money is money. Zippin was able to raise new funds in part because has been on a tear this year, which is saying something because the entire cashierless checkout space is blowing up. Zippin now powers 30 stores around the world, has launched stores at Barclay’s Center in New York City, and opened up a pop-up cashierless checkout store with AMEX at the U.S. Open this week. With $30 million, it will be able to scale up and out even further.

With today’s announcement one thing is for sure, Zippin isn’t missing any C-notes.