For decades, grocery stores have occupied a strange position in modern commerce. They are among the most essential institutions in society, touching nearly every household every week, yet behind the scenes many still operate with systems frozen in another era. While rockets land themselves and artificial intelligence reshapes industries at breakneck speed, many supermarkets still rely on paper invoices, clipboards, fax machines, and manual inventory processes.
That contradiction became impossible for Brandon Hill to ignore. As co-founder and CEO of Vori, Hill is leading a company attempting something much bigger than software modernization. Following Vori’s $22 million Series B funding round led by Cherryrock Capital, the company is pursuing an ambitious mission to create the operating system for grocery retail and ultimately build what Hill calls the “self-driving grocery store.”
The opportunity is enormous. Across the United States, more than 220,000 food and beverage retailers generate approximately $1.5 trillion in transaction volume. Yet despite the sector’s scale, grocery remains one of the world’s most overlooked and undigitized industries.
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In just two years since launch, Vori has processed more than $500 million in payments and served over one million shoppers across communities stretching from Staten Island to Seattle. The company has evolved from a simple inventory tool into a broader platform handling payments, pricing, inventory management, and store operations.
For Hill, however, this is more than a business opportunity. It is deeply personal. He describes himself as “third-generation grocery.” His parents spent decades working in food retail and manufacturing, and their own love story began in the grocery industry. They met while pitching products to supermarket buyers in upstate New York. On his mother’s side, grocery ownership stretched even further back, with grandparents operating small stores in Oklahoma. Grocery was never simply an industry around him; it was part of the family identity.
Still, it took an unexpected discovery years later to reveal how much opportunity remained hidden in plain sight. While visiting his parents, Hill came across stacks of invoices and operational paperwork from grocery stores. At first, he assumed they were relics from decades earlier. They were not. The documents represented active systems still being used in 2019.
The realization stunned him. At the time, Hill and his future co-founders had backgrounds shaped by Stanford, Google, SpaceX, aerospace engineering, and self-driving technologies. They were accustomed to worlds defined by automation and technological sophistication. Yet across the street from SpaceX headquarters, where reusable rockets were changing space exploration, grocery stores were still managing inventory with clipboards.
The contrast felt absurd. How could companies build technologies for multi-planetary futures while the businesses feeding civilization still relied on paper?
That question led the founders into Y Combinator and eventually to the birth of Vori. The company did not begin with grand visions of transforming an entire industry. It began with a narrow but important problem. The founders focused first on helping stores reorder inventory from suppliers and move away from paper-based processes.
Getting customers required persistence rather than scale tactics. The founders walked grocery aisles, studied store layouts, sought out owners, and returned repeatedly even after rejection. Grocery, they discovered, was an industry built on relationships and trust.
One of their earliest opportunities came at Market at Edgewood in Palo Alto. Store operators initially doubted the young founders could solve any meaningful challenge, but eventually agreed to share their frustrations. Inventory management sat at the center of everything.
Unlike restaurants or coffee shops, grocery stores manage tens of thousands of products sourced from hundreds or even thousands of suppliers. Errors meant empty shelves, wasted inventory, and lost revenue. Armed with spreadsheets, notes, and photos from the store, the founders returned to a garage workspace and built a prototype in just eleven days.
Then came the moment that changed everything. Testing the application in a dairy section, an employee named Jaime began scanning products and generating digital purchase orders. Midway through the process, he paused, looked at the founders, and told them he had goosebumps. Moments later, he reportedly lifted one founder into a bear hug.
For Hill, the moment represented something larger than customer feedback. It was evidence that they had uncovered a deeply painful problem and built something people genuinely loved.
Still, emotional validation alone was not enough. One customer became three, then five, and eventually dozens. Over time, Vori expanded from inventory ordering into a full operating system combining point-of-sale technology, payment processing, inventory systems, shopper marketing, and dynamic pricing tools.
The leap was far from simple. Replacing a grocery store’s operating system, Hill says, is like performing a heart transplant. Few businesses make such decisions lightly.
Vori eventually discovered a formula that worked. Every conversation centered around three metrics: sales, margins, and labor. The company focused relentlessly on improving those economic drivers.
Hill says customers have seen meaningful gains in profitability by reducing waste, improving pricing decisions, and eliminating repetitive work. Employees once buried under administrative tasks could now focus more directly on customers and store experiences.
The company’s adoption speed surprised even insiders. Sales cycles increasingly resembled consumer purchasing behavior rather than traditional enterprise software timelines.
Artificial intelligence has since become another major catalyst. Hill sees AI as more than an efficiency tool. Within Vori, autonomous systems now help manage inventory replenishment, personalized promotions, and pricing adjustments. Tasks that once required multiple manual steps can increasingly happen automatically.
Internally, AI has also transformed operations, compressing development timelines and changing how teams build products and execute sales strategies. Yet Hill believes an even bigger transformation is underway across retail. He sees a quiet race unfolding as companies like Walmart and Amazon pour resources into AI-driven retail infrastructure. While those giants compete for the future of commerce, thousands of independent grocery businesses remain underserved.
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That gap, Hill believes, represents Vori’s opportunity. Not every chapter of the journey has been smooth. Hill recalls one painful incident involving a failed dairy order that threatened a major customer relationship. Instead of accepting failure, the founders rented a refrigerated truck, drove across multiple stores, recreated the missing inventory themselves, and delivered products before opening hours. The experience became a defining lesson. Problems, Hill learned, can become opportunities to strengthen customer trust.
Today Vori’s ambitions stretch well beyond software subscriptions. The company envisions becoming the operational and financial infrastructure supporting the global food supply chain. Its immediate goal is scaling to thousands of stores and significant recurring revenue milestones. Long term, however, the vision is far larger.
Hill imagines a future where grocery stores operate with intelligent systems handling operational complexity in the background while humans focus on community and experience. Not replacing people. Augmenting them.
In that future, grocery stores may become more than places to buy food. They could evolve into community spaces where technology quietly disappears into the background and people become the center of the experience once again.
