The companies that are out there in the market, in order to serve their objectives better, need significant funding. In particular, for startups, fundraising is crucial to harness their rich potential to contribute to the growth of their respective industry and market. Without a funding source, a business, specially technology-business will flounder under the weight of its own debt. With the advancements in technology, the requirements, assets, and liabilities of such firms have grown exponentially in recent years. Amid this, funding works as a fuel on which a business runs and excels. When it comes to technologies like omnipresent AI or artificial intelligence, the pressure naturally increases to thrive in the market where big techs like Google, Microsoft, and significant others are operating.

Accel Robotics, one of a growing number of AI startups that's setting out to enable automated cashierless stores, has raised $30 million in a series A round of funding led by SoftBank, with participation from New Ground Ventures, Toyo Kanetsu Corporate Venture Investment Partnership, and RevTech Ventures. Founded out of San Diego in 2015, Accel Robotics is developing the AI and computer vision smarts needed for checkout-free stores, which are designed to make queuing a thing of the past and will generate vast swathes of consumer data. The general idea is that the shopper simply walks into a store, picks items from the shelves, and then walks out again -- with the receipt sent directly to their mobile device. Accel Robotics has largely flown under the radar compared to other companies operating in the burgeoning cashierless store sphere, but it said it is already working on deployments across North America and Japan -- including in restaurants and drugstore chains. Amazon is arguably the highest profile cashier-free store operator, and since the ecommerce giant debuted its concept Amazon Go stores back in 2016, it has expanded the outlets to 18 locations across the U.S. A number of startups have launched to bring automated supermarkets to every city by helping retailers adapt their existing stores.