‘Find your customers, investors will follow’
New Delhi: Like most, Abhinav Srivastava, the co-founder and chief executive of Palo Alto-based unicorn Mashgin, also detests long queues at stores during checkouts. Determined to tackle the issue head-on, he and his team developed an intuitive solution—a touch-less checkout system powered by cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision.
“Despite self-checkout machines, customers usually struggle to locate the barcodes, scan items, and make electronic payments before collecting the items and exiting a store," he said. Mashgin’s system enables customers to effortlessly place an item on a tray, make electronic payment, and swiftly exit the store without having to scan barcodes, he added.
The system not only reduces customer frustration, but also enhances revenue for retailers by significantly speeding up the checkout process compared to traditional points-of-sale or dealing with cashiers. According to Srivastava, the system utilizes cameras to instantly identify various items, including packaged goods, open-plated food items such as fruits, salads and combo meals, or produce, from any angle.
Retailers also benefit from its subscription service, as they need not invest in hardware, and “we even take care of any software and hardware upgrades". With 99.9% accuracy rate, the self-checkout kiosks have been deployed in over 3,000 locations, including grocery stores, airports across the US, ski resort cafeterias, theme parks, aquariums, stadiums, and fast-food restaurants.
Despite his passion for physics, Srivastava’s journey to entrepreneurship took an unexpected turn, after pursuing a computer science degree at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IIT-D). “To be honest, the first time I saw or touched a
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