Walk into any grocery store in America and look behind the counter.
In most of them, you will find a system that has not changed meaningfully in forty years. A legacy POS running on Windows. A separate inventory system. Prices updated by printing labels in batches. Orders placed by phone or fax. The owner, who is often also the buyer, the floor manager, and the bookkeeper, will spend more than forty hours a week on administrative tasks that no software company has built solutions for yet. Vori is on a mission to change that, giving every grocery store the modern operating system it has never had.
The market hiding in plain sight
U.S. food retail is a $1.5 trillion market. The 21,000 stores outside the national chains account for 75% of it, and they are running on technology from the 1980s. These are the neighborhood markets, the ethnic grocers, the specialty stores that families have owned for generations. They are the fabric of local commerce. And they have been left behind by almost every wave of modern software.
That is not an accident. It is a structural consequence of a market the enterprise players never built for. The major POS providers historically served national chains with internal IT teams and capital budgets. They charged licensing fees and support contracts that only made sense at scale. Independent operators either paid up or made do.
This is not a niche inefficiency. Industry-wide, grocers lose $82B annually to out-of-stock items, $48B to pricing errors, and spend 40+ hours of manual labor per week per store on tasks that could be automated. The problem is immense and structurally underserved.
Meanwhile, the macro environment has shifted decisively. Store owners face post-pandemic margin pressure, generational ownership transfer to operators who grew up with smartphones, and labor shortages that make manual processes untenable. The market is ready for something new. The question was who would build the right product with the right model to serve it.
When we got into Vori's numbers, the thesis crystallized fast. Fifty stores live in the first twelve months of monetized product. 99% logo retention and zero competitive losses to date. A Go-to-market flywheel that was compounding and stores reporting net sales increases of 9–22%. An AI pricing engine that caught over half a million supplier cost changes in a single year, margin protection that previously would have slipped through unnoticed. And a proven business model: take rate on payment volume, revenue aligned with store success, no large upfront check required.
This was not a category in early innings of product discovery. This was a category in early innings of scale, with a company that had already proven it could win.
The right to win
Brandon Hill is not a founder who discovered grocery from the outside. He is third-generation in the industry. His family has been in grocery and consumer goods his entire life — both parents built long careers at companies like Reynolds and Kraft Heinz. He has watched independent operators struggle with the same broken systems across generations. That is not something you absorb from a pitch deck. It is the kind of knowledge that builds a very particular form of conviction in a founder: the kind that does not quit.
Brandon is a Stanford graduate and Fellow at Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. His co-founders bring a complementary combination of technical depth and product instinct. Co-Founder and CTO Rob Pinkerton built infrastructure at SpaceX, Twitter, and Lyft, the systems engineering background that gives a company the right to compete at scale. Co-Founder and CPO Tremaine Kirkman grew up in East Palo Alto, a food desert, and has built every product decision around a deep, personal understanding of what is at stake for the communities these stores serve.
These founders are not building Vori because grocery is an interesting TAM exercise. They are building it because they believe these stores deserve to survive and thrive, and they are not willing to fail them. These are the founders Cherryrock wants to back.
What Vori built
Vori OS is a full-stack operating system for grocery stores: POS, inventory, ordering, pricing automation, shopper loyalty, analytics. It’s a unified system that brings together all of the disparate components required to run a store.
The product makes a grocer’s business immediately and measurably more profitable.
Vori's AI-powered pricing engine catches cost changes from supplier invoices in real time. In 2025 alone, it flagged over 577,000 supplier cost increases. Without Vori catching them in real time, these cost changes slip through unnoticed, quietly eroding margins even further.
The results across the network speak for themselves:
The ROI is not theoretical. It shows up in P&Ls.
“Vori is the best investment I’ve made in the past 20 years.”
— Nick, Owner — The Willows Market, Menlo Park, CA
He said Vori was the best investment he'd made in 20 years. Not the best software. Not the best vendor relationship. The best investment, full stop, in two decades.
The business model is designed to align with store success. Vori earns a take rate on payment volume, which means revenue compounds as stores grow. A grocer does not write a large upfront software check to get started. This removes the single biggest adoption friction in a market that has historically resisted software spend, and it creates a natural alignment of incentives that deepens over time.
In 2026, Vori launched Vori Capital, a buy-now-pay-later product that allows stores to finance their hardware and implementation costs. It removes what remained of the upfront barrier to adoption, accelerating both close rates and time to activation.
For context on the scale of what Vori has built: Walmart is spending over a billion dollars to deploy electronic shelf labels across its stores. That is a single feature inside Vori.
What made us move with conviction
Vori was not raising when we approached them. We had done the thematic work, mapped the market, and formed a clear view on what the category-defining company would look like. When we found Vori, we asked to go deeper. They invited us to meet customers. We visited stores, spoke with owners, and watched the product in operation. The more we learned, the more certain we became.
Cherryrock Capital invests in a concentrated portfolio of companies we believe can define their categories. We do not chase rounds. We build conviction and then we act on it. Vori fit every criterion we look for: a massive, structurally underserved market; a product that generates clear and measurable customer outcomes; a business model that scales with customer success; and a founding team with both the domain depth and the operational capability to win.
We are thrilled to be joining Vori on this journey, to lead their Series B, and to join the board.
The momentum since
Since launching in January 2024, Vori has processed more than $500 million in payments across 130 stores in 55 cities. The commercial velocity has been remarkable: what used to take a year to close now closes in a month.
The executive team assembled around the founding core reflects the ambition of the moment. Anthony Fusco, who scaled customer success and hardware operations at Toast and SpotOn, joined to lead activations. Vincent Gentile, formerly Head of Commercial Sales at CloudKitchens, leads the national sales organization. Jesse Lopez, who built product marketing at Gusto, Brex, and Square, joined as Founding Product Marketing Lead.
Karmel Market, the largest Halal supermarket in Minneapolis, will be powered by Vori. The deployment pipeline now spans from Seattle to Staten Island.
What we believe is possible
Grocery is not a niche. It is one of the oldest and most important categories in American commerce, the stores that feed communities, employ local families, and represent the kind of small business that the modern economy has spent two decades making harder to run.
Vori is building the infrastructure that changes that equation. An operating system that gets more capable and more valuable with every store it serves. A payments layer that compounds with volume. A data and financial services platform that, as it scales across retailers and their supply chains, creates genuine and durable defensibility.
We are proud to partner with Brandon, Rob, and Tre. The stores that adopt Vori do not leave. Every install compounds. We believe they are building something generational, and the window to define this category is open right now.
