Retail Tech Company Clerk Announces $30M Series B as Grocers eCommerce-ify Stores

As grocers look to apply the learnings of eCommerce to the in-store experience, companies that offer the ability to blend the physical and the digital to drive conversion have a major opportunity.

On Friday (April 29), retail technology company Clerk announced on LinkedIn that it has raised $30 million in its Series B funding round. The company offers a marketing and merchandising platform that includes a “Grocery TV” product whereby brands can advertise on small in-store screens, as well as a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) artificial intelligence (AI-)powered merchandising platform featuring a range of shelf-stocking data analytics capabilities.

“When we have the opportunity for growth, we want to take it,” Marlow Nickell, co-founder and CEO of Clerk, told TechCrunch in an interview. “We will use this round to catapult us into the market. Something that is unique about this space is that grocery stores want to know you are going to stick around, so to be a successful technology company in the space, you have to be building a lasting company and one that will be a tech partner for the future.”

The company already has a fair amount of proof of concept: it has more than 14,000 displays in grocery stores including ShopRite, Bashas’ and Cub Foods locations, and it advertises for major companies including PepsiCo, Chase, Mondelēz and Mars.

Certainly, the bar for catching consumers’ attention is being raised, with the constant stream of digital content in online spaces making stores’ static advertisements comparatively less engaging than they have been in the past. Now, some tech companies are not only offering video advertising in stores but also to leverage these displays to gain more insight into brick-and-mortar shoppers’ behaviors, as retailers can do through eCommerce channels.

Take, for instance, marketing platform Perch, which uses computer vision to create touch-responsive digital media in stores, leveraging the technology to gain data to help drive conversion.

“Eighty-five percent of transactions occur in stores … So we came at it as a fundamental question: why can’t you click on products in store?” Trevor Sumner, CEO of Perch, told Karen Webster a June 2021 PYMNTS interview. “Brands are forced to try and connect with people before they get to the store, and not when they’re in front of the products, which doesn’t make any sense to us, because when you’re at the store, that’s the point of consideration.”

See also: Perch And Purina Team To Give In-Store Shoppers A Web-Like Product Experience

Moves such as these can be especially effective, given that brick-and-mortar remains how the vast majority of consumers shop for groceries, according to data from PYMNTS’ January study “Decoding Customer Affinity: The Customer Loyalty to Merchants Survey 2022.” The report, created in collaboration with Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, which drew from a census-balanced survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers, found that 82% of grocery shoppers prefer purchasing products in stores, while the other 18% prefers to shop digitally.

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