Making Every Supermarket in America Autonomous

1. AEAaron Epstein0:00

   [upbeat music] I'm excited to welcome Brandon from Vori, here to announce a $22 million Series B led from Cherry Rock Capital. Brandon, thank you so much for joining.

2. BHBrandon Hill0:15

   Super excited to be here.

3. AEAaron Epstein0:16

   Yeah. Maybe to start things off, uh, tell us a little bit about what Vori does, and give us the state of the business right now.

4. BHBrandon Hill0:21

   Vori is an all-in-one point of sale and agentic store management system for supermarkets. So just to lay the framework, there is over 220,000 food and beverage retailers across the United States of America generating $1.5 trillion overall processing volume, and Vori is helping them move off of paper and pencil to run their stores more profitably and to feed their communities more sustainably. Vori's business today, we're processing over $500 million in payments since launch two years ago, and we've served over one million shoppers in communities across the United States, from Staten Island to Seattle.

5. AEAaron Epstein0:59

   Yeah, I didn't expect that the industry is even that big. And, uh, we were talking earlier, it's bigger than restaurants, bigger than hotels-

6. BHBrandon Hill1:06

   Uh-huh

7. AEAaron Epstein1:06

   ... is grocery.

8. BHBrandon Hill1:07

   Yeah.

9. AEAaron Epstein1:07

   And I, uh, I think that's often overlooked. But, um, talk about how you got into this because you kind of have a family background, uh, in the space, right?

10. BHBrandon Hill1:17

    I'm third-generation grocery, actually.

11. AEAaron Epstein1:18

    [laughs]

12. BHBrandon Hill1:19

    So my parents have been in the business for 40 years. They actually met and fell in love in a supermarket in Upstate New York. My mom worked for a number of food and beverage manufacturer companies. So like, Mondelez, which makes Oreos, and Oscar Mayer, which makes, like, the, the famous wiener. My dad also was the North American Director of Sales for Reynolds Consumer Products, which makes, like, the grill foil that you might use, uh, on Fourth of July barbecues.

13. AEAaron Epstein1:43

    Mm-hmm.

14. BHBrandon Hill1:43

    Right? They were star-crossed lovers. They met in, uh, the headquarters of Price Chopper in Upstate New York-

15. AEAaron Epstein1:50

    Hmm

16. BHBrandon Hill1:50

    ... in Schenectady, where, uh, they both had sales meetings pitching to grocery buyers. And since then, you know, they started the family and, uh, and here I am. But even before then, on my mom's side, my grandparents were in the grocery business. They had small stores in Oklahoma, where my mom is from. And so really this is like a generational thing in my family. But for me, I, you know, I went to Stanford. That's where I met two of my best friends, Rob and Trey. Trey I worked at Google with. Rob, who was a, uh, aerospace engineer, um, worked at SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and then did self-driving cars, uh, at Lyft. And I remember, back to our YC interview, I brought this stack of papers to the YC interview-

17. AEAaron Epstein2:31

    [laughs]

18. BHBrandon Hill2:32

    ... that actually my parents had showed me back when I was visiting them in Minneapolis.

19. AEAaron Epstein2:35

    Yeah.

20. BHBrandon Hill2:35

    They showed me this stack of invoices and paper catalogs from grocery stores. And I remember first seeing it, and I look at it, I'm like, "Okay, this is some relics from when you were my age, right? Decades ago." They said, "Uh, no, this is from 2019."

21. AEAaron Epstein2:51

    Yeah.

22. BHBrandon Hill2:51

    And it was 2020 at the time. And I was shocked that this was the state of the art of the largest undigitized retail format in the, in the world, and also that grocery is the most frequent consumer shopping behavior on the planet, and it's paper, pencil, fax machines, and paper clips. And so I show this to Trey and Rob, and we're all collectively dumbfounded. And what's crazy is, you know, Rob had worked at SpaceX. If you imagine the SpaceX headquarters, across the street is a grocery store. At SpaceX, they're re-landing rockets. At the grocery store, they're taking inventory on a clipboard. And somehow on the same planet, in the same zip code, you have, um, a company that's, like, terraforming other planets and putting, creating kind of multi-planetary species. But then in the grocery store is just as important, we're feeding civilization here on Earth, but it's so antiquated.

23. AEAaron Epstein3:49

    Yeah.

24. BHBrandon Hill3:50

    And so we got really inspired to say, "What could we do to solve this?" So it actually launched an odyssey on our part. We went through Y Combinator. We applied. Um, we got to work-

25. AEAaron Epstein3:57

    You brought that stack of papers so we could see the problem

26. BHBrandon Hill4:00

    ... we brought the paper. Yeah, exactly. Like slam- I remember slamming it on the table like, "Guys, can you believe this?"

27. AEAaron Epstein4:03

    [laughs] I remember that.

28. BHBrandon Hill4:05

    That was a crazy time. And we went through YC with this vision to create the operating system for grocery.

29. AEAaron Epstein4:10

    Yeah. And talk about, uh, it, it was a little bit different back then than, than what you're doing today, what the product is today, right?

30. BHBrandon Hill4:16

    We started with a wedge 'cause it's, you can't build everything at one time. And we started with a wedge, which was, how do we help grocery stores reorder inventory from their wholesale suppliers-

Episode duration: 28:16