FinTech news in Foothill Ventures category

Now thanks to a cash infusion of $6.7 million, Siddiqui believes Veeve can solve this problem in two ways: with its full shopping cart model and the new Plug&Play device that can be clipped onto existing shopping carts to turn them into smart carts. Veeve wasn’t planning on going after new funding, but after securing contracts with large retailers that had hundreds of stores and thousands of carts needed, the company’s founders realized additional funding would accelerate deployment timelines, Siddiqui said. Where he feels Veeve pulls away from the others is some of its features, including a lighter cart with a basket size that holds two times more than competitors, a more powerful battery that can run 18 hours a day and a weather-resistant design so it is easier to roll the carts out the parking lot. That’s when he hooked up with fellow Amazon engineer Umer Sadiq, and together in 2018 started Veeve to build Amazon Go, but inside a smart shopping cart.

Pow, who worked at Ox Labs, a decentralized exchange protocol builder, and his co-founder Hongzi Mao, a computer science Ph.D. from MIT, have created a desktop tool that uses machine learning algorithms to turn still avatars into motion-tracked ones. Available as a Chrome extension, Hologram swaps out Pow’s real video feed with the cat avatar.