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Vori is Helping Local Stores Compete With Retail Giants

Vori provides a unified platform that combines inventory management, point-of-sale (POS) systems, and supply chain data aggregation for the grocery supply chain. The East Palo Alto startup was founded in 2019 by Stanford alumni Brandon Hill, Tremaine Kirkman, and Robert Pinkerton.

The startup’s core argument is that the grocery industry keeps evolving. Although it’s fragmented and dynamic, that is where the opportunity lives. The U.S. food retail market, which spans supermarkets, grocery stores, food marts, and specialty shops, is worth $1.5 trillion. This is more than restaurants and hotels combined. 

Furthermore, there are 45,575 U.S. supermarkets, generating an average of $711,806 in weekly sales per store. But Walmart and Amazon together control about a quarter of that market. Both have made aggressive moves to deepen their grip on it, most notably Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods. Vori is not trying to compete with them. It is pitching itself to the 75% of operators outside the big-box orbit.

Cofounder and CEO Hill is a third-generation grocer. His parents met and fell in love in an independent grocery store while his grandparents ran a small store in Oklahoma. The idea for Vori started in 2020, when he was visiting his parents in Minnesota and saw a stack of paper invoices and wholesale catalogs.

“I looked at these books, and I said, ‘Okay, what is this? a relic or a souvenir from you guys when you guys were my age?’” Hill told Fortune. “And they said, ‘No, this is how grocery stores operate here in 2020.’” His mother now works at Vori.

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The software handles payments, tracks inventory, reads supplier invoices, adjusts shelf prices, creates purchase orders, and helps grocers make smarter restocking decisions before customers walk out empty-handed. In an industry where independent grocers are still battling 39% store-level turnover, that kind of operational support is not a nice-to-have. It is survival infrastructure. 

What’s Next for Vori

Since its launch in January 2024, Vori says it has processed more than $500 million in payments across 55 cities and served more than 1 million consumers. Payments make up roughly 60% to 70% of revenue, a deliberate model that Hill says helps keep software and hardware costs lower for stores that are already paying payment processors.

The investors backing Vori see the opportunity clearly. Brown-Philpot, who started her VC firm in 2023 after selling TaskRabbit and working with SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund, says the grocery industry has been underinvested in for a simple reason. It is complex. 

“The number of SKUs in a grocery store is an order of magnitude higher than that of a restaurant,” she told Fortune. “You can’t just copy the code that quickly.” Hill puts that complexity in concrete terms. Grocery stores can carry between 50,000 and 100,000 individual products, and some Vori customers are doing $100,000 in sales per day from a single location.

With numbers like that, the conversation about automation becomes inevitable. But Hill is careful about how he frames it. This is not a story about robots replacing grocery workers. It is about giving owners their lives back. 

“It’s not about eliminating jobs,” he said. “It’s about how do you fill gaps so you don’t have to spend 60 to 70 percent of your time moving data from left to right?” For the independent grocer juggling invoices, inventory, and staff all at once, that framing hits differently.

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The funding will go toward bringing AI to an industry that, in many cases, is still running on fax machines, paper invoices, and a patchwork of disconnected tools for point-of-sale, inventory, ordering, loyalty, and payments. It is a long overdue upgrade for a sector that has resisted modernization far longer than most. This latest round brings Vori‘s total funding to $32 million, following its $10 million Series A in 2022, led by The Factory.

Main Image: Vori cofounders, Brandon Hill, Tremaine Kirkman, and Robert Pinkerton. Image Credit: Vori

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