In late March Moscow startup Briskly raised $3 million from Maxim Poletaev and Gauss Ventures alongside two unnamed new investors. Poletaev, a former Sber executive, and Gauss, a Cayman-based fund with Russian connections, backed Briskly from the very beginning, with a $370,000 injection in 2019.
The deal came just five months after a previous $2 million round — and is preceding a new one, planned in May, to raise another $6 million, the company told East-West Digital News.
Founded in 2018, Briskly has developed a suite of products for unmanned retail. Its ‘B-Pay’ app is used in more than 11,000 shops and other outlets, says the company, with customers scanning barcodes of products and paying for purchases with their mobile phone.
“With the Briskly platform, your store can sell 15% more and work twice as fast. No staff, no queues,” the startup claims.
Briskly has also developed self-service microstores (‘Micromarkets’): these ‘smart fridges’ may be installed an office, business center, or any other place, to sell ready-made food with cashless payment. This machine is available for just $1,300.
“Since the beginning of this year, we’ve sold Micromarkets in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Lithuania and Croatia. The first ones are already up and running in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.” company CEO Gleb Kharitonov told EWDN.
“After Germany, our plan is to scale to EU countries really fast,” he added. Briskly has just acquired a factory in Vyborg, close to the Finnish border, making the EU the most accessible market.
“We also aim to open our first Micromarkets in the US and the UK by the end of 2021.”
Briskly touts its third product, ‘Briskly Go,’ as a “turnkey unmanned store,” including the required technical equipment and security systems. It is available for $25,600, according to the company’s website.
Kharitonov says Briskly is now pursing its R&D commitment to enhance app safety, service and payment system: “It is really important to make things perfect when you target foreign markets.”
Briskly provides its international customers with individual online support account managers. Hardware service support is provided through a network of partners.
According to Kharitonov, Briskly’s unmanned retail process — with customers unlocking the door, scanning barcodes and checking out through a mobile app — has no analog. “It took a year from us to create a really good barcode-reading system and the whole platform. Our competitors are not even close to offer such features.”
Among these competitors is Self, offered by Uvenco (Russia), with a more classic approach of small in-office retail machines.
On the global scene, Briskly will measure itself against such companies as MishiPay, a UK-based provider of Scan&Go mobile systems, Future Proof Retail (USA), 365 Retail Markets (USA).
An Indian startup operating in the same field, Perpule, has just been acquired by Amazon.
