Focal Systems

Our Story: Solving Multi-Billion Dollar Problems in Brick and Mortar Retail.

Retailers are desperately trying to catch up to the seamless experience of online but they are falling short. As labor costs increase, retailers are asking employees to do more with less, resulting in a frustrating shopping experience and a mass exodus of shoppers to online retailers because of convenience and lower cost.

Enter Deep Learning Computer Vision! Imagine a store where you can walk in, grab a cart, ask it questions if you need help, throw items into it, and then walk out when you are ready. No checkout line. No hunting down store associates. No out-of-stocks. This is not a fantasy; this is the reality Focal Systems is building to fully automate B&M Retail. Focal Systems is delivering an indispensable competitive advantage for B&M Retail to beat their online counterparts.

Founded in 2015, we set out to build Computer Vision applications for Retail and CPGs to solve some of their biggest, oldest multi-billion dollar problems. We graduated Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch and have since grown considerably and assembled an exceptional roster of employees, investors, advisors and partners.

Our team consists of Stanford PhDs and Masters students with backgrounds from Apple, Google, and Facebook, specializing in state-of-the-art machine learning and computer vision – the same technology used by Amazon Go, Google’s self-driving cars, and other applications.