As COVID-19 spread increases the need for social distancing, Wagonfly that provides contactless shopping and delivery experience for its customers, on Monday said it raised about $500,000 from Investment Trust of India (ITI) group-led early-stage venture capital fund, ITI Growth, and angel investor Manoj Kumar.
The Bengaluru-based startup uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, commonly used for identifying and tracking objects, to tag items in a retail store for providing an end-to-end smart shopping solution from inventory management to asset tracking and smart checkout without the need for any human intervention.
“While this is a 25-year old technology, over the years the cost of RFID tags have come down considerably, which has helped us create a contactless shopping experience and a seamless supply chain solution for retail outlets,” said Mohit Gulati, managing general partner, ITI Growth Opportunities Venture Fund.
“We have already partnered with the men’s apparel brand Wrogn, and are looking to partner with more brands after the lockdown gets lifted. Wagonfly’s solution is what will help retailers build trust in shoppers to walk into brick and mortar stores – by creating a completely contact-free shopping experience with zero human interaction and cashier-less stores. It is imperative that brick-and-mortar update their stores into experience centers than mere transactional avenues, now more than ever,” he added.
Founded by Raghavendra Prasad in 2018, the firm also operates CafeFLY, an online marketplace that allows customers to order all household essentials such as food grains and personal care items online. The delivery is completely contact-free and made within 24 hours.
“Covid-19 has changed the complete retail paradigm. In the coming days, whenever the retail opens consumers are going to prefer contactless journey in brick and mortar as well as in e-commerce,” said Prasad.
“Wagonfly is going to play a lead role in creating contactless retail experience to customers in stores as well as in malls through their contactless checkout technology, in addition, it allows the merchandise to be tracked from the factory till the consumer providing companies lot of data points for necessary actions to benefit the consumers as well as the companies,” he added.
