Israeli Startup Oriient Raises $4M For In-Store Navigation

Oriient, an Israeli startup founded in 2016 that uses magnetic fields and smartphones sensors to provide indoor positioning services, announced on Thursday that it raised $4m in seed funding from Israeli seed stage venture capital fund F2 Capital, and the Innogy Innovation Hub, the accelerator and venture capital arm of German energy company Innogy SE.

The company says it provides “enterprise-level businesses including retailers, airports, malls and wholesalers, with the ability to allow their customers to navigate large areas and locate items with pin-point accuracy.”

Mickey Balter, founder and CEO of Oriient, said in a statement: “Amazon Go put the retail industry in a frenzy – big box retail is focusing on saving people the five minutes it takes to checkout, but what about the hour spent trying to find everything in the first place? “We started Oriient to solve this problem and have cracked the code with technology that is both highly accurate, cost-effective and easy to deploy.”

Jonny Saacks, co-founder and managing partner at F2 Capital, said “Oriient is finally solving a long-standing problem in the market providing accurate indoor positioning without the need to deploy any costly infrastructure.”

Oriient’s technology, said Annemie Ress, managing director for Innogy Innovation Hub, “has the potential to radically enhance the consumer experience across many settings and, as their pilots highlight, is attracting significant interest from forward-thinking customer-focused businesses.”

Oriient said in a company statement that it is “already working with the world’s largest retailers, as it scales to unlock the power of indoor navigation by delivering an experience similar to online search, to in-store shoppers.”