AI built for the aisles: Vori autonomously manages operations for a $1.5 trillion industry still running on technology from the Reagan administration
SAN FRANCISCO, May 6, 2026 — Walk into a grocery store and you are looking at the largest undigitized retail segments on earth. While nearly every other sector has been rebuilt by software, grocery still runs on fax machines, paper invoices, and dozens of disconnected systems.
Vori is building the self-driving operating system for grocery stores, designed to manage a store’s entire operations from end to end. It handles checkout and payments at the register, tracks every item on every shelf, places orders with wholesalers, sets prices, runs promotions, and more.
Today, Vori announced a $22 million Series B led by Cherryrock Capital, with participation from Greylock Partners and The Factory, led by Stanford AI researcher Chris Ré.
In the past six months, Vori has doubled payment volume, with new stores being onboarded every 24 hours. Since launching in January 2024, Vori has processed more than $500 million in payments across 55 cities, serving over 1 million consumers nationwide.
United States food retail—supermarkets, grocery stores, food marts, and specialty shops—is a $1.5 trillion market, bigger than restaurants and bigger than hotels. Walmart and Amazon have invested heavily in this space, capturing 25% of U.S. grocery spending.
But no one is building technology for the other 75% of the market, for the operators still running on tools from the Reagan era 40 years ago. Grocery is one of the most operationally complex businesses to run, with stores juggling tens of thousands of SKUs, inventory that spoils by the day, a web of fragmented suppliers, and margins so thin there’s no room for error.
At the core of Vori is a unified system that brings together all of the disparate components required to run a store:
- A system of record that tracks all activity happening in the store in one place: every sale at the register, every case in the back room, every price on every shelf, every order placed with every wholesaler, and every loyalty member. Today this lives across a POS, a separate inventory system, a separate ordering system, a separate loyalty app, and a stack of paper invoices.
- A system of action, where AI agents leverage what the store “knows” to actually do the work. When dairy runs low, Vori writes the purchase order and sends it to the wholesaler. When a heat wave hits, Vori cuts the price of ice cream, updates every shelf tag in the store, and reports the sales lift back to the owner that night.
- A system of transaction, which processes every dollar that flows through the store. Payments represent approximately 60% of Vori’s revenue, with support for EBT, WIC, HSA, and FSA, each requiring complex, state-by-state integrations.
Every additional store on Vori makes every other store on Vori smarter. A strategic pricing move that works for owners in Sacramento shows up as a recommendation in Tampa the next morning.
By the end of 2026, the work that today eats a store owner’s nights and weekends—counting inventory, calling in orders, hand-keying price changes, reconciling invoices against deliveries—will run on its own. Over time, the company aims to become the clearinghouse for trade across the global food supply chain, connecting stores, distributors, brands, and payment systems into a single network.
“My family has been in grocery for three generations, and for most of that time the answer to ‘how do we run this store better’ was simply ‘work harder,'” said Brandon Hill, co-founder and CEO of Vori. “That no longer works. Grocery stores require what seems like never-ending decisions and adjustments to be made every second of the day just to stay running. With AI now making it possible to automate all operations, the cost of inaction is now existential. We plan to be the platform that powers the industry-wide rebuild of the systems that run grocery.”
Vori is led by a team with deep roots in grocery and engineers from SpaceX, Stripe, Square, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Amazon. CEO Brandon Hill is a third-generation grocer—his grandparents were in the industry, his parents met in a supermarket, and his mother works at Vori today.
“Grocery is an antiquated business with an enormous market, which AI can catalyze to bring growth and efficiencies,” said Stacy Brown-Philipot, founder of Cherryrock Capital. “We back companies that have audacious visions grounded in relentless execution and Brandon’s team at Vori is one of them. Before writing a single line of code, the team spent four years earning a PhD in grocery, going store to store, learning the rhythms, workflows, and economics that no outside company had bothered to understand.”
For more information, please visit https://www.vori.com/.
About Vori
Vori is building the autonomous grocery store. The platform runs checkout, inventory, ordering, pricing, and payments as a single system, and gets smarter with every store that joins. The company was founded by third-generation grocers and engineers from SpaceX, Stripe, Square, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart.
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Jenny Chao
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SOURCE Vori
