The World's First Pure Vision-Based Unattended Store is in Operation: Chinese Startup YI Tunnel is Disrupting Global Giant

BEIJING, March 26, 2018 (Newswire.com) - Since it was officially launched in January this year, the famous e-commerce giant YI Tunnel has been the focus of attention worldwide. Information from multiple sources shows that the e-commerce giant intends to open six more unattended stores this year. Yes, it works through machine recognition based on over 100 cameras and sensors plus the gravity mixer technology. Although the cost is very high, people are still enthusiastic about it. This indicates that there is a huge potential in the market for unattended stores.

With WeChat Pay and Alipay being accepted around the world, Chinese entrepreneurs have eventually enabled people to understand that the Earth is flat and that the ability of today’s Chinese entrepreneurs to innovate and come up with cool tech gadgets is not inferior to and even above that of their international counterparts. China’s AI retail solutions provider YI Tunnel and KUPU, the core brand of CCOOP, a public company of China’s Hainan Airlines, jointly created the world’s first pure vision-based unattended store. The store dynamically determines who you are, what you have bought, and how much you have spent through an “access control system + smart shelves” built with facial recognition and semantic action recognition technologies. It no longer uses traditional RFID and sensor technologies. This helps to dramatically reduce the cost of building the hardware systems of an AI-based unattended store while increasing the possibility of fast expansion.

Since the test operation began at the end of January this year, the 15sqm unattended store has received several thousand customers, and the total sales are in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of Yuan.

With a retail chain as its partner, YI Tunnel is expected to reproduce its unattended store at speeds faster than that of Amazon Go.

An official news report of KUPU says: “The first unattended store of KUPU took only three months to be launched from data collection to project completion. Because it adopts a pure vision-based unattended store solution, the cost is only 1/20 of that of the global giant. Besides, after product modeling is completed the data can be used forever to reduce OPEX effectively. After operating for a period with the intent to become mature, this solution will quickly increase the reproduction speed of chain stores, and each store will take only about two weeks. This will solve the bottlenecks faced by traditional convenience stores such as the slow growth, the growing cost, the declining sales, and the reducing profitability. Therefore it’s not difficult to find that if this solution can be deployed quickly and on a large scale, it will drive the iteration and upgrade of traditional convenience stores, to produce a brand effect. It may also lead the transformation of the convenience store industry to enable us to come out on top in the future competition under the new retail model and become a new growth area for us.”

With a retail chain as its partner and the experience of successfully launching an unattended store, YI Tunnel can be expected to surpass Amazon Go in the reproduction speed. Upgrading traditional stores would be much faster than opening new stores, as the later would involve site selection and interior construction before being open for business.

With its unstoppable pure vision-based technology, YI Tunnel has become a leading player globally

YI Tunnel currently provides three solutions, and the pure vision-based technology is the selling point for all of them. The first solution is the world’s first AI unattended cash register from YI Tunnel, which enables automatic checkout by “looking” and redefining the checkout experience. The second solution is the world’s first pure vision-based AI vending machine, which redefines the automatic vending machine industry. YI Tunnel's third solution is the pure vision-based unattended store solution, mentioned above, with a cost far lower than that of a global giant, which is set to redefine unattended stores.

With its three solutions, YI Tunnel is already collaborating with renowned Chinese companies such as Yonghui and Hainan Airlines. Overseas, they have signed letters of intent with multiple companies in the United States, Japan, and Europe, etc.    

As a dark horse in AI retail, YI Tunnel was able to complete two rounds of fundraising in three months  

In 2017, YI Tunnel completed two rounds of fundraising in just three months. YI Tunnel received tens of millions of Yuan in investments from Baidu Ventures, Fengshion, and Kinzon Capital. It was the most eye-catching dark horse last year in the AI-based new retail industry. 

The YI Tunnel team currently has about 200 people. They have obtained the marking data for over one million SKUs. CEO Yili Wu graduated from the prestigious Tsinghua University. He is a “serial entrepreneur” who used to work for the e-commerce division of Oracle and IBM with approximately 11 years of experience in the retail industry. The core technical team has 20 members. Most of them are also the alumni of Tsinghua, like the founder Yili Wu.

In December last year, YI Tunnel signed an exclusive agreement with Tsinghua to build an AI-based algorithm platform for retail scenarios, as well as a framework for the development and evaluation of primary algorithms under those scenarios. This will apply the cutting-edge academic results in the real-world industrial environment to accelerate the process of making retail intelligent.

Source: YI Tunnel