Trigo was founded in 2018 by brothers Michael and Daniel Gabay with the aim of transforming the way we do our grocery shopping. They wanted to create grocery stores that are powered by AI and that use data to improve the shopping experience. “Our mission, first and foremost, is to help shape a new way for customers to do their shopping in-store. We want to take brick and mortar stores into the future,” says Daniel Gabay, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Trigo.

This digitalization of the supermarket shopping experience requires a great leap forward in technology. Trigo supplies retailers with a technological infrastructure that turns their stores into “smart stores,” allowing shoppers to simply shop and go. No tills. No checkouts. Trigo applies its proprietary algorithms to ceiling-mounted cameras that automatically crunch and analyze anonymized data on customers’ journeys and product choices. And each customer’s shopping is tracked and billed through Trigo’s solution, EasyOut™. The average shopper is not always predictable. Shoppers can put items back on the shelves, swap out items, or rearrange what is in their shopping baskets as they move around a store. So, the Trigo team had to create a way to understand and interpret shoppers’ behavior.

“To make a truly frictionless shopping experience, you need to account for every interaction in the store, before the shopper leaves with their items,” says Gabay. “We do that by generating a 3D model of each store’s ecosystem, and then when a shopper walks into the store, the shopping experience is triggered. We then continuously measure their virtual shopping basket, using AI computing and 3D modeling from hundreds of cameras simultaneously connecting and generating this unified experience.”

3D modeling can achieve high accuracy while supporting natural human interactions in the store, such as putting an item back on the shelves. This enables a fully seamless shopping experience, so people don’t have to act or interact with the products differently in order to receive an accurate basket or receipt, allowing them to truly enjoy autonomous stores.

This level of technological transformation requires partners that are innovative and can provide scalable solutions. That’s why Trigo chose Google Cloud.

Delivering scalability to Trigo’s shopping solutions

The main factor that Trigo looked for in a cloud partner was flexibility. Trigo needed an infrastructure that could scale easily, be fast, and be efficient. As a startup, Trigo was very focused on coding times, so cost-effectiveness was also key to its choice. Google Cloud offered the company exactly what it wanted to fulfill its vision. “We felt Google Cloud was the best solution for what we needed. Beyond Google’s Cloud robust capabilities and products, we chose Google because they have been a proactive partner who looks beyond the bottom line and are attentive to our needs. For us, having them in our corner was crucial.” says Gabay.

Trigo is expanding globally, with new stores opening and sending real-time data from all over the world—North America, Europe, the Middle East, and more. Google Cloud has servers present in all of these regions. “Having a partner with an extensive global presence helps Trigo provide a better overall service for our retailers. For example, by using local servers, we can reduce the latency time for receipts and shorten the time we can process the data,” says Gabay.

As Trigo opens more stores, there will be a significantly heavier data load for it to store and analyze. Gabay explains: “We chose Google Cloud because we needed a cloud service partner that could handle this rapid addition of data, as well as work on short timelines without any lags or blackouts that will affect the rollout of our new stores and bottom line for us and our retailers. For us, this level of reliability and scalability was key.”

Trigo’s seamless shopping experience is dependent on a lot of complex, moving parts, using everything from AI and 3D modeling to barcode data. “I think our role in the physical retail space is to support this convergence between online and offline to support all the major trends for omnichannel communication,” says Yotam Aronovitz, Head of Partnerships at Trigo.