Grabango, a venture-backed startup that was vying to take on Amazon in cashierless checkout technology, is shutting down after it was unable to raise enough money to stay afloat.

“Although the company established itself as a leader in checkout-free technology, it was not able to secure the funding it needed to continue providing service to its clients,” a spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC on Wednesday. “The company would like to thank its employees, investors, and clients for all their hard work and dedication.”

Food tech publication The Spoon reported earlier on Grabango’s closure.

Launched in 2016, Grabango was developing checkout-free technology that uses computer vision and machine learning to track and tally up items as shoppers grab them from store shelves. Will Glaser, Grabango’s founder and CEO, is a longtime Bay Area technologist who cofounded music streaming service Pandora.

The company employed roughly 100 employees, according to LinkedIn and Pitchbook.

Grabango raised just over $73 million, Pitchbook data shows, with its most sizable financing round coming in 2021, before the market turned. In June of that year, Grabango raised $39 million in a round led by Commerce Ventures, with participation from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund as well as the venture arms of Unilever and Honeywell.

In February of this year, Glaser told Axios the company had plans to go public “in a couple of years at a $10 billion to $15 billion market cap.”

The IPO market has dried up since early 2022, with just three notable venture-backed companies debuting in the U.S. this year. The lack of liquidity has hammered the venture industry, making it harder for firms to launch new funds and for startups, outside of a select few AI companies, to raise capital.

Based in Berkeley, California, Grabango was seen as one of the primary rivals to Amazon’s cashierless checkout offering, called Just Walk Out. Other startups in the space include AiFi and Trigo.

Grabango had inked deals with grocers including Aldi and Giant Eagle, along with convenience store chains 7-Eleven and Circle K. Amazon has targeted its Just Walk Out service to convenience stores and retailers in airports, stadiums and hospitals, among other venues.

Amazon in April pulled its cashierless checkout technology from its U.S. Fresh stores and Whole Foods supermarkets. In a blog post following that decision, Glaser said Amazon’s reliance on shelf sensor technology in its JWO system had “proven to be its Achilles’ heel.” Glaser said Grabango eschewed shelf sensors in favor of computer vision which put it on a path for “widespread adoption.”

“This is a classic Tortoise and Hare parable, but with the players taking on surprising roles,” Glaser wrote. “The much larger Amazon lept to an early lead, but was unable to turn it into a sustained success. The more nimble Grabango, ironically, took the more difficult technical path, and is now reaping the benefits of its patience with a fundamentally more capable system.”

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Amazon said Wednesday it’s testing adding mini warehouses to Whole Foods supermarkets as part of a bid to attract more shoppers to its stores and away from other grocery competitors.

The company is building a micro fulfillment center attached to a Whole Foods location in the Philadelphia suburb of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Once the facility is operational within the next year, shoppers can order items from Amazon’s website and its online grocery service, Amazon Fresh, while browsing Whole Foods and pick it up in store as they’re checking out.

At a press event held near an Amazon warehouse in Nashville, Anand Varadarajan, who leads the product and technology teams for Amazon’s worldwide grocery business, showed a mockup of what the completed facility will look like. A small automated warehouse would be bolted onto a Whole Foods store, where robots fetch and ferry items like socks, soda bottles or tennis rackets and place them into bags for pickup by the shopper.

The arrangement would allow shoppers to buy staple goods from brands that aren’t carried at Whole Foods markets like Pepsi soda and Kellogg’s cereal, and tap into Amazon’s vast online catalog of items.

Amazon said it’s looking to “eliminate those extra trips” made by shoppers to other grocery stores. The average American shops at two different grocery stores per week, whether to maximize their cost savings, shop from a broader range of products, or take advantage of different promotions at each store, according to an April study from market research firm Drive Research.

“Customers shopping at Whole Foods Market today are looking for natural and organic products,” Varadarajan said during a presentation on Wednesday. “However, our data shows that many of them also visit additional stores to complete their regular grocery shopping needs. With our micro fulfillment center, we can reduce the need for our customers to visit different stores or make multiple online orders.”

Amazon has for years angled to gobble up a bigger share of the grocery market. It’s a category where Americans frequently spend money, more than other verticals like clothes or electronics. But Amazon also faces stiff competition from entrenched players like Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons, along with regional grocers.

In 2017, it spent $13.7 billion to acquire Whole Foods, a price tag more than 10 times higher than Amazon had paid in any prior deal. It’s also launched a growing stable of grocery offerings, including a grocery delivery service and its own supermarket chain, Amazon Fresh, aimed at the mass market.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has also said the company has a growing business selling “everyday essentials” like paper towels, dish soap and other items.

OpenAI is increasingly becoming a platform of choice for cyber actors looking to influence democratic elections across the globe.

In a 54-page report published Wednesday, the ChatGPT creator said that it’s disrupted “more than 20 operations and deceptive networks from around the world that attempted to use our models.” The threats ranged from AI-generated website articles to social media posts by fake accounts.

The company said its update on “influence and cyber operations” was intended to provide a “snapshot” of what it’s seeing and to identify “an initial set of trends that we believe can inform debate on how AI fits into the broader threat landscape.”

OpenAI’s report lands less than a month before the U.S. presidential election. Beyond the U.S., it’s a significant year for elections worldwide, with contests taking place that affect upward of 4 billion people in more than 40 countries. The rise of AI-generated content has led to serious election-related misinformation concerns, with the number of deepfakes that have been created increasing 900% year over year, according to data from Clarity, a machine learning firm.

Misinformation in elections is not a new phenomenon. It’s been a major problem dating back to the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, when Russian actors found cheap and easy ways to spread false content across social platforms. In 2020, social networks were inundated with misinformation on Covid vaccines and election fraud.

Lawmakers’ concerns today are more focused on the rise in generative AI, which took off in late 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT and is now being adopted by companies of all sizes.

OpenAI wrote in its report that election-related uses of AI “ranged in complexity from simple requests for content generation, to complex, multi-stage efforts to analyze and reply to social media posts.” The social media content related mostly to elections in the U.S. and Rwanda, and to a lesser extent, elections in India and the EU, OpenAI said.

In late August, an Iranian operation used OpenAI’s products to generate “long-form articles” and social media comments about the U.S. election, as well as other topics, but the company said the majority of identified posts received few or no likes, shares and comments. In July, the company banned ChatGPT accounts in Rwanda that were posting election-related comments on X. And in May, an Israeli company used ChatGPT to generate social media comments about elections in India. OpenAI wrote that it was able to address the case within less than 24 hours.

In June, OpenAI addressed a covert operation that used its products to generate comments about the European Parliament elections in France, and politics in the U.S., Germany, Italy and Poland. The company said that while most social media posts it identified received few likes or shares, some real people did reply to the AI-generated posts.

None of the election-related operations were able to attract “viral engagement” or build “sustained audiences” via the use of ChatGPT and OpenAI’s other tools, the company wrote.

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