Making Every Supermarket in America Autonomous

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-11

[00:00:05]I'm excited to welcome Brandon from Vory here to announce a $22 million series B led from Cherry Rock Capital. Brandon, thank you so much for joining.

[00:00:15]>> Super excited to be here.

[00:00:16]>> Yeah, maybe to start things off, uh, tell us a little bit about what Vory does and give us the state of the business right now. Vori is an all-in-one point of sale and a gentic 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 Vor is helping them move off of paper and pencil to run their stores more profitably and to feed their communities more sustainably. Vory's business.

[00:00:47]Today, we're processing over $500 million in payments since launch two years ago, and we've served over 1 million shoppers in communities across the United States from Staten Island to Seattle.

[00:00:59]>> Yeah. I didn't expect that the industry is even that big. And we were talking earlier, it's bigger than restaurants, bigger than hotels, is grocery.

[00:01:07]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:07]>> And I 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?

[00:01:16]>> I'm third generation grocery actually.

[00:01:19]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 Manderly, which makes Oreos, and Oscar Meyer, 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, right? They were starcross lovers. They met in uh the headquarters of Price Chopper in upstate New York in Skenctity 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.

[00:02:14]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, Loheed 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 that actually my parents had showed me back when I was visiting them in Minneapolis. They showed me this stack of invoices and paper cataloges >> from grocery stores. And I remember first seeing it and I look at it, I'm like, >> "Oh, okay. This is some relics from when you were my age, right? Decades ago."

[00:02:47]They said, "Uh, no, this is from 2019."

[00:02:51]>> Yeah.

[00:02:51]>> 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 rellanding 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 multilanetary species. But then in the grocery store is just as important.

[00:03:45]We're feeding civilization here on Earth, >> but it's so antiquated.

[00:03:49]>> Yeah.

[00:03:49]>> 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 cominator. We applied. Um we got >> we brought that stack of papers so we could see the problem.

[00:04:00]>> Exactly. Like slam I remember slamming it on the table like can you believe this?

[00:04:03]>> I remember that.

[00:04:05]>> That was a crazy time. And we went through YC with this vision to create the operating system for grocery.

[00:04:09]>> Yeah. and talk about it was a little bit different back then than than what you're doing today, what the product is today, right?

[00:04:16]>> We started with a wedge because 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 >> and move them off of paper, pencil, and fax machine. And we have this little mobile app that we spun up in a couple weeks. And through the course of Y Cominator, that's how we grew from our first store, which we had knocked on the door to get and begged them to use it.

[00:04:41]Um, all the way through, you know, hundreds of stores over our first year being live. And then from the success of that one app is how we expanded into adding other features on top to build this broader store management platform that powers an entire supermarket end to end. Mhm. And um do you remember how many stores you had by demo day?

[00:05:02]>> You know, I think we had 24 stores and those 24 were folks like Molly Stones and these were important names in the Bay Area. Molly Stones, >> Berkeley Bowl, and a few others. And these were early adopters that that saw this product and they said, "Honestly, we have a huge pain point cuz we're spending hours flipping through papers, phone calling our suppliers to order bananas and ketchup and rice, and you just make it click of a button easy for me to get inventory to my shelves so I'm not out of stock."

[00:05:34]>> Yeah.

[00:05:34]>> Yeah.

[00:05:34]>> Yeah. Talk about that a little bit. The product was obviously very early. um especially the beginning like you had no reference customers or social proof that this was something that anybody should trust you with. How did you get your first customers and what was that like trying to get some of those sales?

[00:05:49]>> Grocery as an industry just like many of these old school industries it's about relationships. It's about trust and honestly it's about persistence. And for us, honestly, the first the first cohort of customers were really about walking into the store, looking a store, asking for the store owner. Actually, before even doing that, studying the grocery store, walk the aisles, see what items are on the shelves, what makes the store unique, and then finding the owner in the store, asking for their time, and saying, "Hey, my name is Trey. My name is Rob. My name is Brandon. We are very interested in your store. You have a beautiful store and we want to know what problems we could help solve for you. Showing up every day after they kick you out. Show up the next day. Be persistent. And then they say, "Okay, I think you know the stores basically realized that we weren't going to leave." And so they gave us audience. And they sat down and said, "All right, if you guys are serious, I remember the market at Edgewood was uh one of the first stores.

[00:06:43]It's a store in PaloAlto um not far from Stanford's campus. And uh the owners, they finally give us a sit down and they say, "We don't think you can solve any of these problems for us, but since you come in here every other day asking for our time, we can explain what's keeping us up at night." And they explained this a set of problems, but really the most important one for them was it was around inventory management and reordering their inventory. And if you imagine a grocery store, one of the key things that defines a grocery store is that there are not a 100 SKs or a thousand different items. There's 50 or 100,000 items in a grocery store >> that they're ordering from hundreds and sometimes up to a thousand different unique wholesale suppliers and vendors and they're managing using this clipboard.

[00:07:32]>> Yeah.

[00:07:32]>> Now, that takes a lot of time. There's errors there. The problems that the uh the market at Edgewood told us is they forget to place an order and so then a shelf is empty or they order too much and so then they have to throw very good broccoli and produce into the trash can and they said if you can help solve this this would be this would be huge for us.

[00:07:53]Um but we don't think you can do it. And so then we document everything. We asked them can you give us what are you using now? Can we take pictures of it? Can you send us your spreadsheets with your inventory on it? and we went into our garage in East Palo Alto, right across the street, Trey, Rob and I, and we literally we bought like a case of Red Bull and a bunch of like beef jerky and we sat in our garage and we built uh an app to solve this in like 11 days.

[00:08:18]And then we came back to them and we said, "Hey, we think we have something for you." And I'll never forget Haime, the dairy order clerk. We said, "We want to try this with your dairy supplier."

[00:08:27]Um because that's the most important department in a way in the store because everybody's buying milk and eggs every single day.

[00:08:35]>> Haime says, "All right, I'm going take it for a spin." We go to the dairy aisle. He grabs the phone out of our hands and he goes to start to scan these barcodes and place a digital purchase order. Mind you, before he's doing it all on sheets of paper with a bunch of with with spreadsheets on them.

[00:08:53]>> Yeah.

[00:08:55]Midway through he pauses and he and he looks at us three founders sitting there in the dairy aisle. He says, "Guys, I have goosebumps.

[00:09:02]I've never seen something like this before." And then Trey Rob and I look at each other like, "What?" And and Haime literally grabs I think he grabs Rob in a bear hug. And by the way, Haime is like 6'2. He's a large guy, right? And he lifts Rob off the ground. His feet are dangling. He's like gives him a bear hug like nobody's ever built something for me before. And I think it was at that moment we knew even though it was small it was big.

[00:09:30]>> Yeah. Yeah. Was that convinc what convinced you that this was going to work and that you were on the right track or was did you still have doubts after that? Did you need to see more evidence from other customers to know is a common problem?

[00:09:42]>> We definitely needed to derisk it further of course. And so what that moment told us is there's a gap in the market, right? There's clearly a pain point. If if Haime feels this way where he's getting goosebumps and is giving us bear hugs that feels like the type of visceral reaction that that you and that Michael Cable and that Paul Graham talk about when we talk talk about that like unquantifiable feeling of product market fit.

[00:10:05]>> Yeah. We talk about find the 10 customers that love you rather than the thousand that sort of like you.

[00:10:10]>> Exactly. And that is an embodiment of love you.

[00:10:13]>> Yes.

[00:10:14]>> Picking you up, giving you the bear hug and and the goosebumps.

[00:10:16]>> Can we get 10 people to give us bear hugs as opposed to 100 people give us handshakes is kind of the thing. So then from there we're like, "All right, there's a gap in the market. Is there a market in the gap?"

[00:10:27]>> And so for us that's like we needed to get more customers and then we needed to get them to pay us. And so that we went from that one to then to Duki's market where we um met our first employee, what would become our first employee, Abby.

[00:10:40]Uh she was the store director there. She actually helped us redesign that MVP into something that would be more scalable. She took out a napkin and said, "Hey, you should redesign the interface like this." She's a grosser, >> young in her 20s, and we took that, we rebuilt it in her back office, writing code in the back office of the grocery store. We rebuilt the app. We eventually relaunched it to her. She loved it and then you know eventually to the third the fifth the 50th store uh and then we started doing our our first revenue.

[00:11:09]>> What's your uh sales process like now?

[00:11:12]Are you still showing up at the stores or how have you figured out a way to scale that?

[00:11:16]>> Yeah and it's been a very interesting integration. Uh our evolution of our go to market has been very interesting. Of course, in the YC days, it's founders feet on the street. Knock on five stores a day. And then you go from founder exclusive or founder driven to founder le. Then we, you know, eventually we hired our first three reps. And again, this is after we expanded our product surface area. I think what's important before I even get there, I think what's important to understand is it from 2020 to 2024 was actually a long period of what I would consider research and development.

[00:11:50]We expanded from this wedge product in a very tough market which is grocery. It's very durable but it's extremely high barriers to entry because of regulation.

[00:12:01]You have to have government payment types like food stamps and ewick.

[00:12:06]>> It's three orders of magnitude more inventory than uh a restaurant or a coffee shop. So if you think about a coffee shop, they have 50 menu items or a restaurant, there's 100 menu items. In a grocery store, there's 50,000 or 100,000. You have to think about and reason about all that complexity. And so we went on this odyssey over that four-year period where it took us to, you know, design partners in Western Colorado, visiting stores in Amsterdam.

[00:12:30]We want to get this global view of how grocery worked so that we could build the canonical operating system for all of food retail globally.

[00:12:38]>> That was our ambition, >> but we had to do it one store at a time.

[00:12:41]Over the four years, we expanded from just this ordering app that Himeme loved and gave us a bear hug for um all the way to a full stack system that is point of sale, payment processing, inventory management, shopper marketing, and dynamic pricing.

[00:12:59]These are the five pieces that allow us to go in and double the net profitability of the grocery store.

[00:13:04]>> Um and that is the end product that we needed. I actually distinctly remember Michael Cybel we're contemplating man this is a very scary leap to go from just an app which even pre-claw like anybody can build an app to hardware and to payments and to become this like this grown-up compound startup >> and I remember Michael Cel said specifically you this is what you have to do what is where in the grocery store >> is your customer spending the most money our customer being the store what technology are they spending the most money It's on the point of sale. It's on payment processing. It's on the store operating system.

[00:13:40]>> Y >> and we're so we built that out over four years of of of intense research and development. Now, once we launched that, uh it was still founder knocking on doors, earning trust with many of the honestly going back to many of the stores that had trusted us with just our our initial application, >> our ordering app. We said, "Hey, now that was our appetizer.

[00:14:02]>> Now we have a main course for you." Mhm.

[00:14:03]>> And that's how we kind of got our early, you know, first uh like 50 the first 20 stores on the on our end toend store management platform. Then we hire three sales reps. Coming back to your question of our our go to market. Now we go to founderled sales where we have uh you know three sales reps focused on Northern California, gave them quotas and we ramped them and we got them to success. Uh I think you know quotas are roughly a million dollars a year and they were successful. That then led us to uh founder managed sales or even really a scalable go to market motion that we have now where we have a US head of sales. We have a sales team of 15 spread nationally focused on different geographies and there's an inside motion. Um but all of it comes down to that core sentiment of you have to build the rapport with the grocerers. Our sales our sales reps are field sales reps. They knock on doors. They have a playbook for how to um identify grocery stores. You can use various heristics online to figure out what are the best ones, >> Google reviews, um different things. And then once you get in the store, it's about how do you build that relationship and how do you diagnose pain points and uh again have that human touch that YC taught us.

[00:15:17]>> I think a lot of founders um start with a wedge product like you guys did and they think, "Okay, I'm going to sell this wedge. I'm going to find the people that want the wedge and then we're going to expand our product line as you did and then just go back and expand within those businesses and they're going to pay us more and everything will be great.

[00:15:34]>> Was that your experience or was it actually a lot harder than you thought to get people like you're asking people to rip out their point of sales system, >> right?

[00:15:42]>> Even though they trusted you and they used you for this one piece, >> was it as easy as you thought it might be or did it turn out to be harder? And what ended up being the pitch that that that worked to convince them to to rip out the thing that was already working for them?

[00:15:56]>> It actually became a really big deal.

[00:15:58]You're asking them to kind of do a heart transplant.

[00:16:00]>> Mhm.

[00:16:00]>> And not everybody wants to do a heart transplant.

[00:16:04]But what we found out is that if you actually just tightly couple our solution to their P&L and you talk about everything in terms of P&L. So our formula is actually three things. Sales, gross, margin, and labor.

[00:16:19]Everything about Vory right now from the way we build product to the way that we sell it to the way that we onboard it is focused on those end microeconomic levers of the grocery store and our impact overall has been you know over our our whole body of customers 20 to 25% lift in net sales that's massive for a grocery store that's doing a million to a million and a half dollars per month in volume two growing their gross adding seven to 10 points in net prof in in gross margin which is basically a 25% lift from where they are. That's huge. That means every sale they make is more profitable. And then labor to be able to come in and say we can come in and repurpose one or two of your headcount from doing valless work like hanging up shelf tags or printing out paper and and re typing in data into your back office ERP. Forget all that. Go spend time with your customers. You add that stack of value up, all of a sudden Vory is the number one investment that they can make pretty much in their we have grocerers that say Vory is the best investment I've made over 20 years.

[00:17:22]>> So now when you actually approach the store and say, "Hey, we want to rip out your your POS and replace you with something that can double your net profitability," it becomes a no-brainer.

[00:17:30]And so our median sales cycle is something like 18 to 21 days.

[00:17:33]>> And our median deployment cycle is, I think, 37 days now.

[00:17:37]>> Yeah. Um, so it's not like a lot of people might misunderstand and think, oh, it takes Bory six months to sell a grocery store and then another six months to get them live. No, you're actually seeing almost like SMB almost consumer-like buying patterns, but with ERP level complexity and stickiness.

[00:17:56]>> AI's obviously been a huge uh huge change in the world right now. How has that impacted you either in your product or given you tailwinds or made it possible for you to do things that weren't possible before? Um, and is it a risk to your business in any way? Like I know there's a lot of businesses worried about how the world is changing, but everyone's always going to need groceries, right?

[00:18:14]>> I think AI does three things for us.

[00:18:16]Number one, it helps us de deliver a better value prop to our customer in our product. Number two, it allows us to operate more efficiently as as a business. And then number three, there is a defensibility that it gives us overall. So in terms of our product, our product is driven by three agents that take autonomous action on behalf of the grocery store, right? You have our inventory agent that will automatically queue up orders when it's time to replenish from the grocery store or uh automatically generate personalized offers to help grocery store customers um increase their basket sizes. Oh, of course, our pricing agent is uh most powerful because if you imagine tariffs and inflation, >> the cost of goods of a grocery store is always going up. Bananas are going up, milk is going up, >> and the cost that a store has to pay to procure those. And so, how do how do they stay on top of their margins? Vory automatically recognizes a price change uh from an invoice, pushes an update to the shelf with our electronic shelf labels, and make sure that the customer pays the right price at checkout, which is ours as well. And that entire like chemical reaction is done automatically in one step whereas it was 12step process before internally like we are now shipping stuff that would take a year and a quarter and a quarter and a month and a month and a week and a weekl long dev cycle will take a day and that's really exciting and on the go to market side we have sales reps who are coding to win deals. So we're completely AI pill internally. And then lastly, when you think about like the moat, I'm seeing this bifurcation in what's going on with AI. I think you have AI for kind of digital work. People talk about the thin AI rappers. Um pieces of software, like basically the cost of software going to zero. And then you have AI for like real industries. I think Vory sits in this interesting place where we're it's like the halo business heavy asset low obsolescence where we have hardware we have of course we're AI native we have payments and government regulation we have multiple layers of we have operations to get the product in the store >> that only what it takes for us to win only becomes cheaper but what it takes for somebody else to catch up only gets more expensive I'm very bullish on any startup that's building for these big pillars of the American economy healthcare food I think Travis Ken has a whole thing on physical AI. Sequoia actually has a piece on how retail like the the genealogy of retail and how every technological innovation has driven a new unlock like manufacturing unlocked department stores. Railways unlocked Sears. Uh microprocessor unlocked all of Walmart's innovations.

[00:20:53]Now AI is going to produce what? Well, Vory is sitting in this interesting place where we see there's actually Erin, there's this interesting thing going on right now where there is a 1.5 trillion dollar race to transform and define the future of American retail that nobody's talking about. Two of the largest and most operationally rigorous companies on the planet are literally betting their next trillion dollars of market cap on this right now. And that's Walmart and Amazon. Walmart in the past three months have filed 50 retail AI patents to transform Walmart super centers into stores of the future.

[00:21:27]Amazon they invented the e-commerce format. That's how they became a trillion dollar company. Their next 10 years is focused on physical grocery.

[00:21:35]They bought Whole Foods. They spun up Amazon Fresh and Just walk out. But they also are now opening up Costco competitors in Chicago and planning to scale scale like a club format across the country. combined those two companies are what 25% of overall trillion and a half grocery market. The other 75% there's nobody else building Walmart and Amazon scale technology for the rest of you know the 200 plus thousand food and beverage retail locations in the country and definitely you know there's 10 trillion dollars of volume to go out and modernize across the planet.

[00:22:07]>> You help them compete.

[00:22:08]>> We're helping them compete and that's where we're at.

[00:22:11]>> Yeah. You've been building a lot of momentum over the last few years. Um, but I'm curious, what's been the low point for you? It's been a lot of ups and downs. What sticks out as a time when you thought maybe you might not get to this point? I'll tell you a story about a uh a dairy order. So, one of our principles internally is actually don't mess with the dairy order. And it's a ode to reliability because we're Vora is so important as critical infrastructure for the store and the store is critical infrastructure for a community. But one day we literally did not we failed so bad. What happened was um it was actually Molly Stones Palo Alto. I remember we got a call on support at like 5 am because you remember grocery stores open up very they open early but they do their work even earlier and they called saying hey we placed a large Clover dairy order on Vory and Clover just let us know that it's not going to come because Vory dropped the order somehow and we're panicking because if Molly Stones doesn't get milk that means that communities mothers are coming in don't have milk for their for their kids. Kids don't have milk for their cereal. That means there's no eggs for breakfast. And that also, you know, dairy is actually the lost leader.

[00:23:23]People come in to get dairy products and they also get other items throughout the store.

[00:23:28]>> Um, >> and it was going to fall on us. It was going to impact our reputation as like a at that point like a one like a six-month old business.

[00:23:36]>> So, we took a page out of Weiss's book, which is superhero acts of customer service. And what we had to do was we literally rented a refrigerated truck that morning. We drove to I think we drove to Whole Foods. We drove to like a couple like big box locations and literally recreated their order by buying these items off the shelf. And I remember we had like five carts filled to the brim uh of of milk and eggs and cheese. We put it in this dairy truck in this refrigerator truck and we had to deliver it to Molly Stones. and we got there just in time uh for for them to kind of open their doors. And I'll never forget that moment because if we would have actually dropped it, we probably would have lost that account.

[00:24:21]And all the other stores that ultimately signed up for Vory because of Molly Stones, they would have not signed up.

[00:24:27]But because we we kind of stepped up to the plate and delivered, we were able to keep our reputation intact. And to this day, Molly Stones, uh, they tell that story, um, of of how Vory kind of came in and, um, made things right.

[00:24:40]>> It's such a great example of anytime something goes wrong, it's an opportunity to make an even bigger champion out of your customer just by fixing it and and taking action like most people wouldn't, right?

[00:24:50]>> Well, it's like you were saying, like I think that's the competitive advantage of most startups is giving a >> Yep. And you may not have the best product. You may not have the best the biggest team, but just by showing up, taking that phone call at 11 PM or at 5 a.m.

[00:25:06]>> Yeah.

[00:25:06]>> Founders giving their cell phone number to the customer saying, "Hey, look, like you said, my business literally my survival is tied to your success.

[00:25:15]>> I want you to succeed. Call me with anything." Um, that has stuck with us even to this day. Like we're not, you know, now we're national, like I said, doing half a billion dollars in payments volume. Um, still at this point caring matters.

[00:25:28]>> Yep. It's a competitive advantage.

[00:25:31]>> Yeah, totally agree.

[00:25:32]>> What's next for you guys in the next few years? What's the future of Vory?

[00:25:36]>> Vory's goal is to build the clearing house for trade in the global food supply chain. And so we're the path for us is how do we get to 100 million in ARR? That's simply walking and getting our first 3,000 stores on the platform.

[00:25:49]Um, and we can do that with our current product. And so it's just invest in investing in the product, investing in sales and and marketing and deployments and just kind of walking in a straight line. Where we want to go in the long term though is we want it such that if you walk into a Safeway or you walk into a Trader Joe's or you walk into an Aldi or a Costco, you see Vory running what is effectively a self-driving grocery store. We believe in this vision of the self-driving grocery store, which means the store owner. And it's not about replacing humans. It's about augmenting humans and taking the nonsense manual work out of the business. The grocery store of the future will be for the consumer is going to be a very homey environment. The grocery store is actually becoming kind of a third space.

[00:26:34]If you look at if you look at some of the the reports coming out, Gen Z is actually shopping more at grocery stores than millennials in person. They're holding speed dating events inside grocery stores. They're having they're >> just like your your parents >> just Yeah. It's crazy. Um and I think what it is is, you know, there's there's going to be three layers to the self-driving grocery store. There's going to be the system of record layer, like you said, the ERP holding the suppliers, inventory, pricing, all in in on on in one ledger, one login.

[00:27:04]>> You got that?

[00:27:05]>> We got that. We have the system of action which is the agents that now can act on behalf of the store leveraging that data on pricing, inventory and marketing to make them more more money and save them time in their sleep. And then there's the system of transaction layer which is effectively processing every dollar that flows in the store and out of the store. Right now we process every dollar that comes into the store through payment processing. That's actually 60% of our revenue. Mhm.

[00:27:29]>> Now it's like how do you layer on the ability for the store to pay its bills to its suppliers to earn to secure capital from boring if they want to open up a new location or add a new add a coffee shop or a new department to their store. Um and eventually other financial services on top of that. Um and we'll get there. We'll get there over the next 5 10 years.

[00:27:50]>> Yeah. Well, it's a massive secret industry that I think a lot of people don't know about and it's been really amazing to watch all of your growth and progress over the years since the batch.

[00:27:59]Was it six and a half years ago almost now? Um, and to see how well you guys have been doing. So, really appreciate you coming on and and sharing your story here.

[00:28:07]>> Thank you so much. Great to be here.