Simbe, the leading provider of Store Intelligence™ solutions that increase retailer performance through proprietary computer vision and AI, today announced the expansion of its leadership team with the appointment of several key executives. 

Survey of retail decision-makers reveals crucial need for store intelligence, with 40% of respondents planning to invest in new technology to improve operations

Simbe now offers new Store Intelligence™ capabilities to accommodate large format retail’s size and scale while improving business operations

Simbe, the leading provider of Store Intelligence™ solutions that increase retailer performance through proprietary computer vision and AI, today announced record 2023 results that signal accelerated momentum and an exponential trajectory for the year ahead.

Simbe Raises $28M Series B, Led by Eclipse, to Continue Transforming Retail Operations Through AI and Automation

Three years after introducing Tally to select stores, Schnuck Markets, Inc. announced Wednesday it is rolling out additional shelf-scanning robots to 46 locations across the Midwest.

Tally’s primary purpose is to roam around the store autonomously, two to three times per day capturing inventory. It will notify employees with timely information to ensure products are always stocked, in the right place, and correctly priced.

Aisle-roaming robots are coming to an additional 46 Schnuck Market stores to help with tasks such as looking for out-of-stock items and verifying prices.

Each 30-pound robot named Tally is equipped with sensors to help it navigate the store’s layout and avoid bumping into customers’ carts. When it detects areas that aren’t fully stocked, the data is shared with store management.

The added robots means a Tally will be in 62 stores — more than half of the chain, Schnucks said Wednesday.

Simbe Robotics, a developer of grocery store inventory robots, today announced it has inked a deal with Schnucks Markets to roll out robots to 62 supermarkets across the U.S. In 15 Missouri and Illinois pilots during the pandemic, Simbe claims its robots have sped up inventory and replenishment by 14 times at Schnucks locations while minimizing the number of workers in the aisles, reducing out-of-stock incidents by 20%.

Schnuck Markets is bringing Tally, the inventory-management robot from Simbe Robotics it first piloted in July 2017, to half of its stores.

Dave Steck, Schnucks VP of IT infrastructure and development, said the Tally’s use has resulted in 14 times more out-of-stock detection than manual auditing and at least 20% reduction in out-of-stock items.

It’s also increased accuracy of real-time inventory that feeds into Schnucks’ automated replenishment system, allowing for more efficient inventory management. (Associates refer to the benefits as “The Tally Effect,” according to the grocer.)

Schnuck Markets Inc. is launching Simbe Robotics' autonomous robot Tally in 46 additional stores to enhance inventory management. These stores are in addition to the 16 stores that have been piloting Tally during the past couple of years, three since July 2017 and the 13 other stores since October 2018.

For supermarket employees trying to keep track of thousands of individual products on store shelves and quickly replace items that run out, Simbe’s Tally robots are a sight for sore eyes.

Equipped with sensors that record the contents of grocery shelves from top to bottom, the devices scoot around stores on their own, said Dave Steck, vice president of IT infrastructure and development for Schnucks.

A single robot assigned to a store can identify up to 14 times as many out-of-stock items as a human worker and has the ability to easily see items on high and low shelves that may be difficult for a person to access, Steck said. That allows associates in Tally-equipped stores, who would have otherwise have had to manually look for items that need to be replaced, to instead spend their time working with customers or bringing products from the backroom to store aisles.

Shoppers at the midwest-region grocery store Schnuck Markets Inc. will soon share the aisles with an increasing number of automated inventory-counting robots, after that Saint Louis-based company said today it would deploy the bots in more than half of its stores.

Shoppers in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana can expect to see more robots in grocery stores soon. Schnuck Markets Inc. said today that it is expanding deployment of Simbe Robotics Inc.’s Tally to 46 stores, bringing the autonomous inventory robot to a total of 62 locations.

A Midwestern grocer is bringing inventory-counting robots to more than half its stores.

Three years after piloting the Simbe Robotics “Tally” autonomous shelf-scanning robot at select stores, Schnuck Markets Inc. is launching the technology in an additional 46 stores, leveraging Tally’s real-time data to improve the shopping experiences in 62 locations. This follows an initial expansion of the rollout to at least 15 stores in October 2018.

Robots are taking on tasks in hospitals to reduce exposure risk for frontline health care workers, including operating ventilators, taking inventory and delivering PPE.

San Francisco’s Simbe Robotics created a robot that roams the aisles of supermarkets, counting items on shelves and reporting back to its human controllers. And there are a growing number of restaurants working with tech companies on automation regarding temperature checks for diners and employees.

Tally, Simbe's RFID-reading robot, was already in use at Decathlon to more accurately keep track of inventory. It's now becoming important for measuring stock without human contact.

“Tally can more accurately analyze what’s on the shelf and not, freeing up the store team to do tasks like customer service, restocking and sanitization,” said Simbe CEO Brad Bogolea. The robot exemplifies a future in which, instead of robots wiping out swathes of the job market, they do the menial jobs that allow humans to focus on more complex tasks and stay out of harm’s way.

With workers around the world susceptible to COVID-19 infections on the job, companies are trying to find ways to create safer environments.

“Tally is a fully autonomous mobile robot that’s designed to really help retailers better take inventory within retail stores. The goal of Tally is to help ensure product is always stocked in the right place and has the right price.” 

Simbe Robotics produces an autonomous shelf-scanning robot called Tally that can audit inventory at grocery stores through computer vision and machine learning. That's particularly useful for food markets as they struggle to keep products on the shelf during the disruption of the pandemic, says Brad Bogolea, Simbe's CEO.

At a handful of Schnucks Markets stores in the Midwest, Tally, an autonomous robot, scans shelves to alert employees when products are out of stock or labeled incorrectly, said Brad Bogolea, CEO of Simbe Robotics, which developed the robot. "This massive surge in demand was a major shock to most retailers' inventory counts," said Bogolea. The robot has been helping workers restock items on shelves by giving them real-time data on which items are out, he said.

Stores can use the data Tally collects in real-time, so they can optimize products on the shelves. This also helps them make better informed ordering and product placement decisions while analyzing trends. The data can be shared with retailers’ consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand partners to make better business decisions.

On the retail level, a robot called Tally audits entire store inventories two to three times a day, delivering real-time insights to store teams about shelf-health, enhancing customers' in-store experiences and arming retailers, CPGs and brands with highly accurate, timely inventory data needed for smarter, more efficient supply chains.

Conducting inventory checks isn’t the favorite job of any retail employee—and it steals time from the more valuable moments they spend serving customers.

Tally, a robot that cruises the aisles of Giant Eagle grocery stores in Pennsylvania and Ohio, has digital cartoonlike eyes that blink but perform no actual function. A blue computer screen flashes messages informing customers what the robot is doing: “Stock check!” Jeff Gee, a co-founder of Simbe Robotics, the firm that developed Tally, said the eyes were meant to help customers feel comfortable with the device, particularly in areas of the country “where a lot of people have never experienced robots in the wild before.”

Simbe Robotics engineers built Tally to be as unobtrusive as possible, says CEO Brad Bogolea. Tally’s spinning base lets it take up little space in crowded stores, he says, and its digital panels with eyes look in its direction of travel.

Simbe's 6-foot, 85-pound robot, Tally, maneuvers through a store's aisles and determines when products are missing from shelves, when they're on the wrong shelf, when they've been sitting on the shelves for a long while, and whether they're listed at the right price. The robot can scan in two ways, either relying on RFID tags affixed to merchandise or by using computer vision to recognize the products on shelves from a proprietary library of images, as well as the price tags.

On a recent Friday morning at the Giant Eagle in Pittsburgh, Tally discovered that Twix bars and some Febreze plug-in air fresheners were out of stock. Its 12 cameras can scan packaged goods at Giant Eagle but not fresh produce or the freezer aisle. At the Giant Eagle location where Tally has been deployed the longest, it has reduced out-of-stocks by 21%.

By simply walking up and down the aisles, Tally can give you a full updated picture of what’s in your store, and where exactly it is.

San Francisco-based robotics startup Simbe just announced a $26 million Series A.

Robots are coming for the grocery aisle, and that’s because they promise to save storeowners invaluable time by inventorying shelves of stock quickly and accurately.

Simbe Robotics Inc., maker of the Tally retail robot, disclosed two funding deals today.

One of the most peculiar and promising growth areas of robotics, these shelf scanners mean business.

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As the promise of autonomous machines lags the underlying technology, the growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce.

As store locations double as e-commerce order fulfillment hubs, big-box retailers are deploying robots to make operations faster and more efficient. The goal is to offload some tasks from humans so they can focus more on customers.

Digital inventory auditing is one of the growth areas of automation as brick-and-mortars fight back.

Tally empowers Giant Eagle with real-time data to solve for out-of-stocks, improving customer satisfaction

In an interview with Grocery Dive, Simbe Robotics CEO Brad Bogolea said Giant Eagle first expressed interest in the firm's technology in late 2015. The retailer, which Bogolea said was his hometown grocer growing up in western Pennsylvania, began quietly piloting Tally robots in stores, gradually expanding to the three markets where they operate currently. He declined to name how many Giant Eagle stores currently have a Tally in them.

The pilot program will be implemented at three Giant Eagle locations, one in Pittsburgh.

Simbe Robotics creates automatic shelf auditing and analytics solutions to automate some of the most mundane tasks in the retail industry.

From offering companionship to critiquing our ping pong skills, robots are poised to be there for us.

BBC Click gets a look at Amazon's robotic future. From checkout-free grocery stores to vests that protect warehouse workers from autonomous robots. 

Nearly all Simbe’s installations run during normal store hours with customers in the vicinity, says Brad Bogolea, CEO and co-founder. The robots have logged more than 10,000 miles in stores, with the average robot traveling up to one mile with up to three or more trips through the store per day. Yet, having a fully autonomous robot in the front of the store is a different environment due to safety considerations, Bogolea says. Tally has lights and sounds to alert customers of its presence, moves slowly and is programmed to avoid movement near customers.

From the lovable to the practical, robots will be hard to escape at the Las Vegas tech show this year.