Vori - Digitizing The Grocery Store

Company & Team Introduction

Vori is a software platform bringing the grocery industry online with its digital inventory management platform designed to simplify many of the everyday workflows in the grocery business and use data to make more informed purchasing decisions. Vori was founded by serial entrepreneur and CEO Brandon Hill, CPO Tremaine Kirkman, and CTO Rob Pinkerman in 2019. The founding team has impressive resumes, including Pinkerman attending Cornell and previous tenures at Lyft, Twitter, and SpaceX; Hill and Kirkman are both Stanford graduates and previously founded a YC-backed social network focused on online political discussion. The trio created Vori after consulting with Hill’s parents, who have over 40 years of experience in the grocery industry, where they elucidated the many inefficiencies of the antiquated industry. Vori is headquartered in San Francisco and has scaled their team to ~25 employees.

Product Overview

Vori provides a suite of software tools for grocers to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and broaden access to inventory that wasn’t always available to smaller independent vendors. The company connects data across the food supply chain from their sleek POS system to their digital inventory management platform that gives grocers access to an in-depth marketplace of high-quality suppliers from which to source. This allows Vori customers to have one central platform to know what they have ordered and the quantity, what they have in stock, and what they’ve sold in a single source of truth. This data powers their inventory control tool that helps calculate the optimal order volume based on historical and seasonal data. Vori’s platform also offers other valuable features, such as the ability to monitor supplier price changes, scan-based receiving, digital invoicing, pricing management, and margin protection tools. This robust range of products helps grocery stores become more profitable and organized. At the same time, employees are more productive and have more time available to give shoppers an incredible customer experience.

Total Addressable Market

The independent grocer vertical that Vori is catering to is enormous. The company estimates that independent grocers account for approximately 33% of the global grocery industry, creating a potential market opportunity as large as 250B. There are over 30,000 independent grocers in the US alone, and it is one of the highest-growth subcategories of brick-and-mortar supermarkets.

Business Model & The Numbers

Vori operates with a simple “pay as you win” pricing model that only charges their customers when they use Vori. The average per-order charge is around $5, saving companies time and money compared to the manual legacy process and directly aligning the company’s business model with the value provided to their customers. Vori also provides volume-based discounts as a company increases its usage. Companies using Vori cut their time to replenish inventory by up to 80%!

Traction

Vori’s platform has seen strong early adoption from independent grocers as their technology is welcomed with open arms by such an antiquated industry. Vori is already working with hundreds of stores and has thousands of grocers on a waitlist to start using their technology. Vori’s software quickly becomes deeply integrated into a grocer’s new, more efficient workflow.

Competitors

From our research, industry competition is weak for Vori. Legacy competitors like Oracle serve the enterprise of grocery and ink expensive deals with massive grocery chains for complex software, but no one’s solving to bring a simplified and more affordable technology to the SMBs of the grocery vertical aside from Vori. There are also companies such as CornerUp, which provides a similar digital inventory management platform connecting convenience and corner store owners with local suppliers, but they are building and targeting a completely adjacent market. CornerUp has raised ~9M, is headquartered in New York City, and is known for its quick, usually next-day delivery.

Funding

Vori has raised four rounds of funding so far. Initially, the company was funded through a 125k SAFE from YC in 2020 before raising a proper seed round a few months later, raising 3.5 million in additional capital to give the team some runway. In 2021, the company received an undisclosed strategic investment from Mollie Stone Markets, an independent grocer with 9 locations, bringing over three decades of grocery experience to the team. Vori most recently raised a 10M series A round led by The Factory with participation from top firms such as Greylock, E2JDJ, MKT1, and a follow-on investment from their top customer, Mollie Stone Markets.