Vori Raises $22M Series B to Build AI-Powered Operating System for Independent Grocers

People walk into a grocery store thinking about dinner. Brandon Hill walked into one thinking about broken infrastructure. Different appetite. While Silicon Valley spent the last decade funding dopamine machines and delivery apps for people too exhausted to microwave leftovers, independent grocers were still drowning in handwritten inventory counts, disconnected POS systems, supplier ordering chaos, and back-office workflows that looked like they survived the Clinton administration by pure spite.

That disconnect is exactly why Vori raising $22M in Series B funding matters. Brandon Hill, Tremaine “Tre” Kirkman, and Robert Pinkerton are building what they call a self-driving operating system for grocery stores, and the phrase sounds ambitious until you realize this is a $1.5T industry where operators still spend nights and weekends manually reconciling invoices and updating shelf pricing. Nothing says “future economy” quite like somebody changing avocado prices by hand while AI argues online and writes poetry nobody asked for.

Cherryrock Capital led the round with Adrianna Samaniego joining the board, while Greylock and The Factory returned with more conviction. Mike Duboe backed the company early. Chris Ré and Lip-Bu Tan stayed in the mix because serious investors understand one thing: when a company removes friction from an industry this massive, the market tends to notice before the headlines do.

And this story hits differently because Brandon Hill is a third-generation grocer. Leon and Tori Hill spent 40 years inside the grocery and consumer products business. The pain was not theoretical. Tre Kirkman brought product instincts shaped through startup building. Robert Pinkerton brought engineering firepower from SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Twitter, and Lyft Level 5. Somewhere along the way, they looked at grocery operations and realized inefficiency behaves a lot like bad code. Ignore it long enough and eventually the whole system starts coughing smoke.

Now Vori is processing more than $500M in payments, serving over 1M consumers, onboarding stores every 24 hours, and operating across 55 U.S. cities. Stores on the platform report up to 20% less time spent on back-office tasks, while some locations are seeing double-digit sales growth. That is not software sitting pretty in a demo environment. That is software clocking in for work.

There is also something slick about the name Vori. Sounds like “for it,” which feels appropriate. Independent grocers have spent decades surviving despite the technology around them. Brandon Hill, Tre Kirkman, and Robert Pinkerton decided to build infrastructure that finally works in their favor instead of treating them like leftovers in a market obsessed with giants.