Amazon Go competes with Lisbon-based startup Sensei

When Amazon purchased Whole Foods, the upscale grocery chain in the United States, other grocery retailers’ stock prices went down significantly. This has become a bit of a pattern – whenever the e-commerce giant enters a new business, the incumbents are taken aback, and rightfully so. Amazon has a large pool of data to draw from, which it is using in a variety of different ways. In the case of groceries, it has pioneered Amazon Go, the grocery store where you do not have to pay at a cashier, but simply walk out.

However, seeing the enormous potential of this new grocery shopping concept, new businesses have not been sitting idly by. One of them, Sensei, a Lisbon-based technology company that is backed by industry giants such as Germany’s Metro and Portugal’s Sonae, is pitching its technology to European supermarkets as they compete with Amazon to open the region’s first checkout-less stores on the continent.

However, Sensei’s CEO does not necessarily see Amazon’s push into the grocery market as a bad thing. “Amazon Go is the best thing that happened to us,” Vasco Portugal, Sensei’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said. “It would have been much more difficult for us if they didn’t exist, because this is an emerging technology and they are putting pressure on the market to move in this way.” Learn more about the innovative startup here.