Stor.ai acquired by Relationshop

Stor.ai, an e-commerce platform for regional grocers, has been acquired by digital engagement firm Relationshop, the company announced Tuesday.

Details of the transaction were not disclosed. The new entity will be called Stor.ai, a Relationshop company.

Galen Waters, CEO of Relationshop, will be the new head of Stor.ai. Mendel Gniwisch, Stor.ai’s former CEO, will become company president and a member of the board. Gniwisch will focus on international operations, as well as merger and acquisition opportunities, the company said.

Stor.ai was founded in Israel in 2014 and now has more than 100 grocery customers in the U.S. and more than 200 customers worldwide, for a total of more than 500 retail locations in eight countries.

The creation of Stor.ai, a Relationshop company, will create a “unified i-commerce platform” for grocers that combines “data analytics and omnichannel engagement capabilities to increase transactions, enhance loyalty and grow sales,” the company said.

Relationshop’s platform provides omnichannel engagement and personalization tools for health and nutrition, loyalty and rewards programs, email and SMS marketing, digital circulars, and customer data analytics. Relationshop’s technology is in use in 11 grocery brands in the U.S., including Albertsons, United Supermarkets and Big Y Foods. The company was founded in 2007 and was formerly known as Go Think!

“This acquisition gives retailers the ability to advance beyond e-commerce to i-commerce,” Waters said in a statement. “The ‘I’ represents the tenets of our enterprise solution: intelligent data, individual engagement and integrated shopping. We believe that for regional retailers to compete with WIKA (Walmart, Instacart, Kroger, Amazon), they need a technology solutions partner and unified technology platform that drives all commerce—that’s i-commerce.”

Stor.ai shook up its leadership ranks last February, promoting Gniwisch, previously an EVP, to CEO. The move followed the departure of CEO Orlee Tal, who had helmed the company since July 2019.

Stor.ai had been known as Self Point until the company rebranded in December 2020.

In September 2021, the digital platform launched a new picking app designed to improve efficiency through a new suite of tools that allowed pickers to shop for multiple orders at the same time, reducing picking time and cutting labor costs, the company said.

In its lifetime, Stor.ai, a Relationshop company, has logged more than $1 billion in digital grocery sales, more than 140 million personalized product recommendations per month, more than 8 million e-commerce transactions on the platform, and a 12-to-1 return on digital investment for customers, the company said.