Drill: The Mobileye of the Retail World

We would like to introduce you to a company that offers offline stores e-commerce tools: real-time consumer behavior analysis, which provides insights to store owners and predicts consumer behavior to improve the buyer's experience

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Drill

Jan 20, 2022, 07:07 ET

TEL AVIV, Israel, Jan. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- If you told a website owner to imagine his life without Google Analytics, he would probably jump in horror. What would he do without tools and systems for analyzing user behavior? What would he do without the ability to control information and predict the future? With no ability to perform frequent changes, a/b testing, and optimization?

Drill's co-founder and CEO Lanor Daniel and CSO Sivan Friedman Yosef

Website optimization tools have advanced at a dizzying pace over the past decade and contributed to a significant increase in online store revenue of dozens of percentage points. We had become so accustomed to these tools that we had almost forgotten how life was before they were around.

However, the offline arena has failed to leap, and shop owners in the real world lack the tools to maximize the meterage of their online store.

What information does the store owner have about the purchasing process? About the buying experience? About the success of his sales, store location, or shelf arrangements? The answer is that no one knows anything in the store beneath our home. There is no real ability for improvement in stores where we all buy on a daily basis, which make up over 80% of the world's sales.

How come there are few technologies that can optimize physical stores, which make up the majority of sales today and in the future?

The answer lies in the complexity of information gathering, says Drill's co-founder and CEO Lanor Daniel, "In online sales, it is very easy to analyze user behavior, but in the offline market, the process is much more complex. This makes it difficult to analyze a buyer's decision tree at a physical POS, as reflected from the experiences of many companies that have in the past attempted to confront this problem."

"This challenge gave birth to the idea to develop a technology that will aid retailers. It is into this complex arena/ this challenge that Drill has arrived to modify the game's rules. Through the use of AI technology and computer vision, and with some help from a methodology that originated in online marketing funnels, based on the buyer's decision tree while purchasing, we have repeatedly succeeded in proving that we can improve the purchasing experience and increase offline store sales by dozens of percentage points."

"To complete in the challenging offline marketplace, a strong, multidisciplinary team is needed. We have assembled a team made up of retailers and traders, technology and algorithm experts, behavioral scientists, psychologists, marketing staff, strategists, and more, allowing the company to achieve phenomenal results in a very short period of time."

According to the CSO Sivan Friedman Yosef, who co-founded Drill with Lanor, the technology uses deep learning and 3D CNN to identify human behavior against a store shelf in real-time. The models communicate and synchronize with each other via microservices.

"Drill's unique development enables a real-time prophecy of buyers' decisions opposite the shelf based on analyzing the buyers' behavior and environmental variables throughout the entire purchasing experience. Drill facilitates an improved buying experience in a physical shop and optimizes the store owner's daily decisions. Precisely like the world's most advanced online tool."

Among the early investors in Drill, it is possible to find Mobileye's founder Amnon Shashua, one of the largest retailers in Israel, Eyal Ravid, owner of the "Victory" supermarket chain, and Leiman Schlussel, one of the country's largest food imports.

"Just like e-commerce store owners, who do not move without Google Analytics, physical store owners will not want to move without Drill," Ravid says. "I came to Drill to use the technology for my Victory supermarkets. I was so impressed by the product that I decided I wanted to be part of their success, and at the same time decided to invest in the company."

"When a retailer wants to improve the buyer's experience, decide on integrating new products, arrange the store, set a pricing strategy, and so many more critical decisions - he is flying blind. The information we have today is from the checkout line. While it is possible to use tools like smart shelves and shopping carts, these are still incapable of generating insight that Drill's system brings concerning the buyer's behavior. I can understand the consumer in real-time, tell stockers to change the products' shelf arrangement, and other moves, however small, but ones that make a big difference in the store."

Today Drill is in Round A funding to begin penetrating the American market, which is also hungry for retail technologies. Just like autonomous vehicle technology that knows to forecast road behavior, to predict dangers, and recommend a response, Drill knows to predict what the buyer will do and, through the same technology, recommend a response that is appropriate for the retail market, insights, and predictions that will improve the consumer's experience, and can change the retail world as we know it.