The COVID-19 era put the various technologies and products that upgrade our online shopping experience at center stage. But the post-COVID era is here, and we're back to meeting and shopping in the real world – IRL. The Israeli startup Drill announced yesterday (Monday) the completion of a $5 million Series A round, to develop a system that can turn every camera installed in a market network into a buyer behaviour analysis tool. The current funding round was led by BRM and Israeli grocery giant Victory, with participation from existing investor Amnon Shashua and new investor Gadi Reichman.

Are there cameras in the supermarket? That's all it takes

The Israeli startup Drill was founded in 2019 by two entrepreneurs - Sivan Friedman Joseph and Lanor Daniel. Drill has developed a product called Shopper AI that can be installed on any camera, allowing various retail chains and brands to gain insights into how shoppers behave. According to the company's announcement, the product they developed over the past three years can analyze and measure buyer behaviour in physical stores and provide data such as conversion rates to purchase and even a full decision tree analysis of the buyer at the point of sale. The advantage is that there is no need to install additional hardware to analyze buyer behaviour; pre-installed systems work just fine.

At Drill, they say that as part of the development, they studied the behaviour of shoppers at the neurological level in physical stores and collected hundreds of thousands of "nano-behaviours" that shoppers perform in real-time. Based on this information, they created Shopper AI, a system that uses computer vision algorithms they developed to provide insights into each shopper.

The Israeli startup employs approximately 22 people in its offices in Israel and the U.S. To date, the Israeli startup has raised $6.25 million, with the previous round being completed last December. Lanor Daniel, co-founder of Drill, told Geektime that despite recent events, the company is on a growth trend: "We are expanding and improving the system every day." She said they did not feel the impact of the market’s uncertainty and halted investments: "The retail sector is a sector in which technological investment will always be on a growth trend."