FortRoss Ventures, an international investment firm of Russian origin, has invested $10m in a U.S. start-up called Standard Cognition. The young company has come up with new solutions for retail automation, Cnews.ru reported.

FortRoss was part of a sizable investor consortium that put a total of $150m in the start-up in this single round.

Its current post-money valuation of more than a billion dollars makes Standard Cognition the first unicorn in the global market for technology that supports cashierless service at stores.

A combination of cameras, artificial intelligence and computer vision enables a shopper to register with a smartphone as he enters a convenience store, and then take from shelves any items the buyer likes and put those in a bag, backpack, or simply in his pockets. The smart system is reported to be able to automatically identify a list of the items the person took and access his banking card account to make a payment after the shopper left the place.

The new technology does not involve face recognition, thus supporting one’s privacy and anonymity.

With the new investment Standard Cognition will be able to expand considerably and bring its system to more than 50,000 convenience stores over the next five years.

This technology, improved though, is, in fact, no real news to the retail market. Pioneering self-checkout technology was first test-run by Amazon in one of its convenience stores back in early 2018.