Trigo

The problem: the checkout line

Traditional retail makes customers stand in line and scan every product at the checkout. Trigo, founded in 2018, tackles the problem with a network of cameras in the store ceiling. Using computer vision, it identifies which products the customer takes from the shelf and charges them automatically on the way out, without stopping at a checkout. According to the company's own announcement, the system is completely non-biometric: it tracks products, and does not identify faces, fingerprints or any other biometric feature of the customer. According to the company, more than 60 million shopping activities a year feed the training of its models and their continuous improvement. Checkout-free stores are also known to the general public thanks to Amazon's flagship project, Amazon Go, which at the time proved the idea could work.

Funding and a strategic investor: SAP

According to the company's own announcement, Trigo raised $100 million in October 2022, led by the Singapore investment firm Temasek and the fund 83North, joined by a new strategic investor: the German software giant SAP, which committed to help market Trigo's solution to its customers. Existing investors such as Hetz Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners, Vertex Ventures, Viola and the German retail group REWE Group also took part in the round, which was preceded by a $60 million round at the end of 2020. According to SiliconANGLE, which covered the announcement the same day, the 2022 round brought Trigo's total funding since its founding to $199 million.

The company's CEO and co-founder, Michael Gabay, said at the announcement that opening autonomous stores with five of the world's leading retailers had proved that a physical store can be given the same insight capabilities that online stores have.

Customers: from ALDI Nord to Tesco

According to the company, its customers include the German supermarket chain ALDI Nord (a Shop & Go store in Utrecht, the Netherlands), the British chain Tesco, Germany's REWE Group, Netto, the Israeli supermarket chain Shufersal, and Wakefern Food Corp, the largest retailer cooperative in the US. The technology is installed as an add-on to existing stores, so a retail chain does not need to build a new branch from scratch to offer checkout-free shopping. Since July 2025, the company's loss prevention solution has also been available through the Microsoft Azure cloud Marketplace, which makes it easier to integrate into existing IT infrastructure.

Trigo has received industry recognition, including inclusion in Forbes's AI 50 list (2023) and Sifted's B2B SaaS Rising 100 (2024), as well as a joint award with ALDI Nord in the Best AI & Robotics Application category at the Retail Technology Awards Europe 2023.