Standard Cognition

Overview

Standard Cognition is an AI computer vision startup developing technology for physical retail stores. The center of their offering today is cashierless checkout in a retail store, very much competing with the Amazon Go store. Standard Cognition acts as a third party provider to existing retail chains who license their technology and hardware for their stores. A number of chains will be implementing their technology in test stores by the end of 2019. For testing the company also has its own retail store in downtown San Francisco that consumers can use.

Interestingly enough the company claims not to use (or need) facial recognition technology but instead identifies individual shoppers via their shape and movement pattern.

The team is based in San Francisco, California.

Why I like Them

This is technology that feels like the future. The main thing that consumers hate about brick & mortar shopping is the dreaded line at the cashier. Even more fascinating is the technology Standard Cognition has developed may be more advanced than Amazon’s own that powers their Go stores. They need significantly fewer cameras and hardware than an Amazon chain. The space is starting to get crowded however with several other startups and Microsoft developing their own offering.