Octopus & True invest in ThirdEye

We are delighted to be investing again into ThirdEye as part of the round led by Octopus Ventures and alongside retail tech specialists True and existing investor SeedCamp.

We first invested in Raz in the summer of 2016 when the company comprised the 2 co-founders, an idea, a single (very interesting) prospective client and a handful of data-sharing agreements with other prospects to train their machine vision algorithms.  

In short, a typical, early-stage investment for Episode 1. We were investing in 2 guys we had belief in who had a compelling idea (CCTV screens are on, streaming live footage in huge volume, but they aren’t being watched – a machine can be taught to watch them and identify whatever you want them to identify) operating in a huge market (shrinkage alone is a multi billion £ market in the UK).

What has changed since that investment? A lot.

The team now comprises 7 engineers and 1 business development executive. The technology is in multiple retail outlets across London catching 27 thefts per month per camera, a massive uptick on what was possible before ThirdEye.

When we invested in ThirdEye, the automated store was not yet a thing. Amazon Go opened their first public store in Jan 2018, at which point everyone started to get very excited about ThirdEye. The inbound interest surged, coming in from the US, of course the UK, and from Asia – even SoftBank’s early stage fund reached out to me to learn more about the business.  They are on trend and have the most advanced technology we have seen in the market in Europe.

Technology sales to huge retailers are slow, but Raz has managed to get most of the country’s largest supermarket chains to the table and has impressed us (and Octopus and True) with his management of those sales processes, with the superb support of his BD exec, Vera.  

Personally, I have been impressed by Raz’s growth as a CEO over the 2 years we have been on his Board, his ability to attract superb engineers to the business, including a great CTO in Peter Rennert, and his level of calm dealing with near impossible procurement departments whilst also deploying into stores across London whilst also managing a funding round.  

It bodes very well for the future. The future is bright, the future is being recorded and analysed by ThirdEye… if you go shopping that is.