To start, tell us about your role and what VenHub focuses on  

At a high level, VenHub builds and operates fully autonomous retail stores. There’s no staff, no checkout, really no friction in the customer experience. Customers order through a mobile device, a robotic system picks and dispenses their items in between 21 to 30 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I lead our commercial team, which means I’m focused on, building the pipeline, signing partners, and launching customer flagship stores, what we call Pilots, into full-scale deployments.  

From a business model standpoint, we sell the store as infrastructure, hardware plus a SaaS platform, to operators who brand it their own, stock it, and deploy it in their locations. Right now, we have live stores across California, and we're actively expanding across multiple verticals in the US, including transit, fuel and EV, campus, multi-family, entertainment and hospitality. 

What does full automation change for grocery and convenience retail. What's the one assumption about staffed stores that breaks fastest once robots run the floor?  

The first assumption that breaks is that retail requires labour to be reliable. In the traditional model, labour is the “load-bearing wall” – someone has to open the store, run the register, handle issues, and close up. Once you remove that dependency, the entire equation changes. You're no longer asking, “Can I staff this location at 2am?" You're asking "Is there demand here?" Those are very different questions, and the second one opens a lot of locations that were previously non-starters.  

If robotics can win on speed, consistency and 24/7 uptime, what can't a robotic store do yet, and how close is that gap to closing? 

We can support a broad range of categories today, including beverages, snacks, health and personal care, electronics accessories, pantry items, and packaged meals, and that range is expanding deliberately. Our north star is being able to dispense any item a customer wants, and more importantly, to anticipate what they want before they even ask. What excites me most are entirely new use cases, like “drop” models for limited releases, or secure tool dispensing at job sites. Those aren’t traditional retail, they’re new formats enabled by automation.  

VenHub can be deployed at locations inside or outside. How do you think about which format fits which location, and is there a “destination” version of this model, or is the value proposition always going to be pure convenience? 

We design VenHub to fit the location, not the other way around. Indoor, outdoor, high-traffic, standalone, ADA-compliant, even drive-up formats, we’re flexible on form factor. 

Whether it becomes a destination is up to the operator. Because they control the assortment, each store can be completely different. A transit location might focus on chargers and OTC meds. Another might lean into fresh meals. Another could curate hard-to-find or location-specific items. The store is infrastructure, but the assortment defines the experience. 

Automated retail has a mix track record. What did some of the failures get wrong that VenHub is built to get right? 

A lot of early players tried to retrofit autonomy into existing stores, which created complexity that didn’t scale. They also underestimated how much operational burden remained, humans still handling exceptions, validating transactions, staying in the loop. That model breaks under pressure. Eliminating checkout doesn’t eliminate complexity, it moves it upstream into assortment and operations. What you sell, where, and how reliably the system can dispense it becomes critical. We approached it differently – purpose-built infrastructure, and a flexible operating model. Operators can run stores themselves or use third-party partners for restocking and fulfillment. That flexibility lets us scale without adding headcount linearly, and it keeps operators focused on running a tight, high-performing store. 

Beyond operator economics, how do CPG brands and advertisers fit into the autonomous retail model, and does VenHub change the relationship between a brand and a retail touchpoint? 

VenHub turns a retail endpoint into a measurable, data-rich, direct-to-consumer channel. In traditional retail, brands rely on placement and packaging, with limited visibility into what happens at the shelf. Here, every transaction is a data point. 

Because everything runs through mobile, operators have a direct digital relationship with the customer - purchase history, engagement, personalisation, all built in. For brands, that means real insight: what sells, when, in what combinations, and in which environments. 

If the platform and Robots are handing everything, where do people still matter in this model, both in terms of the customer, and for the operator running the store remotely? 

People matter more than ever, just in different roles. Operators can redeploy staff away from registers and toward higher-value work: customer engagement, site experience, problem-solving. Restocking is still human, but far more efficient. One person can manage multiple locations with the right tools and visibility. On the customer side, every meaningful decision is still human – what to buy, when to return. Our job is to make that experience fast and reliable. We haven’t removed people from retail, we’ve removed them from the parts that didn’t need them.