Grocery delivery and pickup firm Instacart has acquired the Israeli computer vision company Arpalus, which says its technology delivers “shelf intelligence” inventory tracking for grocery retail.
According to San Francisco-based Instacart, the accuracy of online orders is only as good as the underlying inventory data. That makes undetected out-of-stocks and catalog gaps among the most persistent sources of customer dissatisfaction in online grocery, driving substitutions, cancellations, and eroded trust. Buying Arpalus will help to counter that problem by enhancing Instacart’s ability to serve consumers, shoppers, retailers, and brands with a more complete picture of on-shelf inventory and product availability, the firm said.
Arpalus says its platform turns a quick video scan of a store shelf into an accurate, real-time picture of what is actually there. Using computer vision models built specifically for the complexity of real grocery store environments—including low or unreliable Wi-Fi, inconsistent lighting, and thousands of visually similar products packed tightly together—Arpalus claims it can identify individual items on shelves with more than 95% accuracy, on average. The technology runs on any smartphone or camera-equipped device, which means Instacart’s network of 600,000 shoppers can generate real-time shelf intelligence at scale using the app they already use on every order.
“We believe the future of grocery retail is a unified experience powered by Instacart intelligence, where what happens in store connects seamlessly to ecommerce in real time,” said David McIntosh, Chief Connected Stores Officer at Instacart. “The Arpalus team has spent years building exceptional shelf intelligence technology, solving the problem of understanding what’s actually on store shelves, at any given moment. With our leadership in Physical AI for grocery retail and by activating our network of shoppers, we can feed even more accurate shelf information back into our models, delivering better outcomes for customers, shoppers, and our retail and brand partners.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
