Standard Cognition helps retail stores stand up to Jeff Bezos' juggernaut. The $50 million-funded autonomous checkout startup is racing to equip bigger shops with scanless payment technology that lets customers walk out the door without ever stopping at a cashier. While Amazon Go opens its own 2,000 square foot boutiques, Standard Cognition is working on outfitting 20,000 square foot and larger drug stores and grocers. That led Standard Cognition to make its first acquisition, Explorer.ai. Why would an automated checkout company acquire a self-driving car startup?

Until this fall, Chintan Maniar managed nearly 200 employees at a Target store in San Jose, California. Now, after 20 years at the big-box retailer, he manages a much tinier storefront in San Francisco. It's staffed by many more cameras than people, and shoppers can walk in, grab a bag of Doritos or a pump-bottle of Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day hand soap, and just walk out. Standard Store, operated by a San Francisco-based startup called Standard Cognition, is open to the public and meant to showcase the company's autonomous checkout technology. When you enter, you use an app to check in.

Deep learning, meet brick and mortar. This is a real time demonstration of our autonomous checkout system, running at 30 FPS. This system includes our models for person detection, entity tracking, item detection, item classification, ownership resolution, action analysis, and shopper inventory analysis, all working together to visualize which person has what item in real time. We're excited to demonstrate more features for our zero friction checkout experience. Stay tuned to see the future of retail.