Even after raising $37.5 million in a new funding round, Augmodo founder and CEO Ross Finman admits that his startup might not sound like the most attractive investment.
The Seattle company helps retailers track inventory and manage data via a variety of tech, including specially designed “Smartbadges” worn by store employees.
“We’re a contrarian bet,” Finman told GeekWire. “Doing deep tech hardware in retail is not what everyone dreams of in AI. But we found people who absolutely loved us, got the vision, got everything we’re going after.”
What Augmodo has been going after since launching in 2023 is validation for its core mission — to help people in stores, from retail associates to store managers to brand owners and drivers dropping off products.
The startup’s first big customer, Australian pharmacy retailer Chemist Warehouse, has played a big part in providing some of that validation. Four months into a six-month pilot using Augmodo tech, Chemist Warehouse had seen enough, and asked to move to full contract and roll out. And they joined in the funding round, which was led by TQ Ventures, a VC firm based in New York City and San Francisco.
“One of the reasons why we raised a very large round is we had a lot of momentum coming out of that,” Finman said of the Chemist Warehouse relationship. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, OK, this works.’ When you have customers as references, you have use cases. That builds a whole lot.”
Augmodo previously raised $5.3 million in seed funding.
The startup’s tech starts with the Smartbadge passively worn by store employees while they move through aisles. Using computer vision, 3D mapping, and other technology, the badges collect inventory data related to empty shelves, overstocking and more.
Employers love the fact that they don’t have to do anything with the hardware, Finman said, other than keep the badges charged and power them on before they’re used. Information is automatically and immediately processed by Augmodo’s software.
Finman said many people don’t appreciate the scale of the data.
“If you’re deployed in one retail chain in the U.S., you’re ingesting eight times the amount of data that YouTube ingests per day,” he said. “The scale of this is [similar to] self driving cars, because you’re getting high resolution feeds from the largest workforce on the planet.”
In Finman’s view, the size of the retail workforce, coupled with the size of the physical data problems, makes retail the most ripe industry for disruption by spatial AI tech going forward.
By tracking every product, Augmodo creates a digital map for each store. The company also allows brands to see the state of their products and promotions dozens of times a day in near real-time instead of having to send someone to check on shelves.
And Finman believes the logical next step would be to augment the shopping experience for customers. Via their own wearable tech running an Augmodo program, customers might be directed to where in a store to find an item on their shopping list, for instance.
“I actually view shopping as one of the best use cases for smart glasses in the long term, because you get your hands back,” Finman said, as he briefly slipped on a pair of Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses during our video chat. “We’re a good middleman to create the search engine for private property, for one of the largest areas of commerce.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg agrees with some of that, saying this week that his vision for “personal superintelligence” is realized through the right hardware, and that glasses would become “primary computing devices.”
Originally from Northern Idaho, Finman is a former general manager in the headset division at Niantic Labs, makers of the location-based game “Pokémon Go.” Niantic acquired Finman’s first AR company, Escher Reality, in 2018 after it was spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Finman is based in Kirkland, Wash., and Augmodo has grown to 20 mostly remote employees.
Finman said Augmodo will use the new investment to expand its team and deal with customer interest. ML infrastructure and computer vision engineers are particularly sought after because of the scale of the data the startup processes.
