Retailers are racing to provide faster, cheaper, and more personalized service. In early June, Amazon announced Prime Free One Day shipping, a move that will again raise the bar for consumer expectations on delivery. Four days later, Walmart announced InHome Delivery to bring groceries directly to customers’ fridges.
The Limitations of Fulfillment Centers
But Amazon’s and Walmart’s networks of fulfillment centers — about 150 each in the U.S. — can only support a certain level of service. Each Walmart distribution center, for example, supports a 150+ mile range. Amazon has focused more on population dense areas and Walmart has its network of 3,568 U.S. stores, but free, instant delivery remains “the future of retail.”
We believe convenience stores represent a critical piece of the future of retail. 93% of Americans live within 1 mile of one of the 155,000 convenience stores in the U.S., according to the NACS.
Investing In Skupos
That’s why we are excited to participate in Skupos’ recently announced $26M Series B round of funding, led by Insight Venture Partners. We initially invested in the company’s A round in August of last year.
Skupos provides real-time, SKU-level data to over 7,000 convenience stores in the U.S. The company leverages data from more than 6 million transactions per day to deliver insights to those retailers, their distribution partners, and the brands of the product sales they track.
This same data will enable C-store retailers to survive, and even thrive, in an on-demand retail world. Convenience stores are an important set of nodes on the distribution network required to achieve free, instant delivery without restrictive minimum orders.
We’re proud to continue our partnership with Jake, Mike, Linh, and the rest of the Skupos team to help build the future of retail.
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