What Tally Does on a Store Shelf
Tally drives the aisles of a supermarket and takes pictures of every shelf it passes. Simbe states that Tally reads on-shelf availability, price and promotion accuracy, item location, and planogram compliance on each pass. A store manager gets a list of gaps and wrong price tags instead of sending staff to walk the aisles with a clipboard.
The published operating figures are specific. Simbe's own frequently asked questions (FAQ) page says Tally scans 15,000 to 30,000 products an hour. Covering a large supermarket takes 1.5 to 2 hours, and Tally runs up to three scans a day. Mapping a new store takes about a day, and Simbe says accuracy targets are usually met within a week.
Shoppers are the constraint the hardware is built around. Tally moves at less than a third of human walking speed, turns in place for narrow aisles, and sits low enough that Simbe describes it as tip-proof. Those choices cost scanning throughput and buy the ability to work during trading hours.
| Published figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Scan rate | 15,000 to 30,000 products per hour | Simbe FAQ |
| Time for a large supermarket | 1.5 to 2 hours | Simbe FAQ |
| Scans per day | Up to 3 | Simbe FAQ |
| Stock keeping units per robot | Up to 80,000 | Simbe FAQ |
| Battery runtime (Tally 4.0) | Up to 12 hours | Simbe, January 2026 |
| Travel speed | Under one third of walking pace | Simbe Tally product page |
| Minimum store size | 1,000 sq ft, most deployments above 5,000 | Simbe FAQ |
The Data Platform Simbe Sells around the Robot
Tally is the collection device, and the subscription a retailer signs is for the data it produces. Simbe sells a Store Intelligence platform that merges Tally scans with two fixed sensor products. Tally Spot watches high-turnover and high-theft areas, and Tally RFID, which uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, covers apparel and other soft goods. A mobile app turns the findings into a ranked task list. A clerk is told which aisle to fix first, instead of receiving a spreadsheet of every error in the building.
Two further products sell the same data to different buyers. Simbe Virtual Tour lets a head-office merchandiser walk a store remotely in high definition. Simbe Brand Insights sells store-level shelf conditions to the consumer-goods brands whose products sit on those shelves. That is a second revenue line, and it does not depend on the retailer buying more robots.
The cumulative totals explain why Simbe markets the Store Intelligence platform ahead of Tally itself. At the ten-year mark Simbe reported 44.8 billion shelf photos captured, 18 billion price tags scanned, 600 million shelf gaps detected, and 80 million promotion errors corrected. A retailer buying a shelf audit today is buying against a decade of labelled images that a new entrant has to build from zero.
Retailers Running Tally Today
Simbe names its deployments, which is unusual in retail technology and makes the claims checkable. BJ's Wholesale Club announced a chainwide rollout across 237 clubs in 2023, the first warehouse club to take Tally. Schnuck Markets was the first grocer to go chainwide, in 2021.
The ShopRite banner is the largest grocery footprint. Its member co-operative began piloting Tally in April 2022 and expanded in 2023, and Simbe now reports results across more than 90 ShopRite stores. SPAR Austria and Harmons are also named customers, alongside a large home-improvement retailer Simbe does not identify.
Simbe reported expansion into six new markets during 2025: Ireland, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Austria, Canada, and Mexico. For the wider category of machines working in food retail, the grocery store robots guide covers scanning, cleaning, and delivery robots together.
| Retailer | Scope | Announced |
|---|---|---|
| Schnuck Markets | First chainwide grocery deployment | 2021 |
| BJ's Wholesale Club | All 237 clubs | 2023 |
| ShopRite stores | More than 90 stores | 2022 pilot, expanded since |
| SPAR Austria | Named customer, store count not published | Not published |
| Harmons | Named customer, store count not published | Not published |
| Large home improvement chain | Named only by category | Not published |
Simbe Robotics Funding and Investors
Simbe has raised more than $100 million in disclosed equity across three named rounds. The $26 million Series A closed in September 2019, led by Venrock, with separate inventory financing from SoftBank Robotics that paid for building robots rather than running Simbe. Eclipse led a $28 million Series B in July 2023.
Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the $50 million Series C announced in October 2024, taking the disclosed total past $100 million. Simbe said at the Series B that annual recurring revenue had grown tenfold since 2020. That is a growth rate rather than a revenue figure, and no revenue number has been published since.
The separate inventory financing in 2019 is worth noting for anyone comparing robotics business models. Robots leased by the month tie up cash for years before a customer pays back the build cost. A hardware company on a subscription model therefore needs a debt line as well as equity, and Simbe arranged one four years before its first chainwide grocery contract.
| Round | Amount | Lead | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | $26 million | Venrock | September 2019 |
| Series B | $28 million | Eclipse | July 2023 |
| Series C | $50 million | Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives | October 2024 |
| Disclosed total | More than $100 million | Multiple | As of 2024 |
| Valuation | Not published by Simbe | n/a | n/a |
Who Founded Simbe Robotics and Who Runs It
Brad Bogolea is co-founder and chief executive of Simbe Robotics, and has held the role since the company started in 2014. He founded it with Jeff Gee and Mirza Shah, two engineers he met at Willow Garage, the Menlo Park lab that produced the ROS software framework. Gee is chief design officer and spoke at the Tally 4.0 launch.
Bogolea's public argument has been consistent for a decade. He calls the physical store the last great data desert, meaning that a chain knows what left the till and not what sat unsold on a shelf at 4pm. Everything Simbe sells follows from that framing rather than from an interest in robots as such.
Simbe is privately held and headquartered in South San Francisco, California. It publishes no valuation, no headcount, and no personal net-worth figure for any founder. Data providers list valuation estimates, and those are inferences rather than disclosures, so any number attached to Bogolea personally is an estimate built on another estimate.
What Tally Costs a Retailer
Simbe publishes no price list for Tally. Its FAQ states the commercial shape instead. There is no upfront cost, and the monthly fee per store varies with store size, stock keeping unit (SKU) count, and whether the retailer takes computer vision, RFID, or both. Hardware, software, maintenance, and 24/7 support sit inside that one fee, so a store that loses a robot to a failed motor does not receive a repair invoice.
One dated public figure exists. In October 2020, The Spoon reported a subscription of $2,000 to $4,000 per store per month for Tally 3.0, varying with the number of stores. It also noted that Simbe said it was working to bring that down. The number is six years old and covers a superseded robot.
Anyone modelling the arithmetic should start from the labour it displaces rather than the sticker. Simbe reports store teams recovering more than 50 hours a week across a deployment. At a mid-range grocery wage, that is the order of magnitude a monthly fee has to beat.
Why Walmart Removed Its Shelf-Scanning Robots
Walmart ended a five-year contract with Bossa Nova Robotics in November 2020, pulling shelf-scanning robots out of roughly 500 stores. It had announced in January of that year that the fleet would expand to 1,000 locations. The expansion never happened, and Bossa Nova cut about half its staff.
Two reasons were reported at the time. Walmart found cheaper ways to get the same data, because the surge in online order picking already had staff walking every aisle and checking stock as they went. Walmart US chief executive John Furner was also reported to be concerned about how shoppers reacted to the machines in the aisles.
The contrast with Simbe is a difference in customer. Bossa Nova's robots were built for one giant retail account, and losing that account removed the business. Simbe sells a data subscription across roughly 60 retailers in 10 countries, with no single chain able to end Simbe by cancelling. Shelf scanning survives where the buyer wants the data feed. It fails where the robot competes with staff who are already walking past the shelf.
What Simbe Robotics Does Not Publish
Several figures a buyer or an analyst would want have no first-party source. Simbe publishes no unit price, no total robot count in the field, no per-store fee, no valuation, and no revenue.
Some technical detail is also absent. Simbe describes over a dozen high-resolution cameras, depth sensing, an NVIDIA edge computing stack, and RFID reads up to 40 feet on Tally 4.0. It does not publish Tally's weight, dimensions, or sensor part numbers. Product recognition has no single stated accuracy figure, though Simbe claims 99 percent accuracy on shelf-label identification.
Tally 4.0 was announced on January 12, 2026, and Simbe said units would reach customers from mid-2026. Whether the fleet has turned over is not something Simbe has published since. Check the Tally 4.0 announcement for the specification, and ask Simbe directly for the shipping status of any store being quoted.
Bottom Line
Simbe Robotics has been putting Tally in stores since November 2015, longer than any other shelf-scanning company still operating at scale. It has more than $100 million in disclosed funding and named chainwide deployments at BJ's Wholesale Club and Schnuck Markets. It also has a decade of shelf images a new entrant cannot assemble quickly. The gap in the public record is money: no unit price, no valuation, no revenue. Anyone evaluating Simbe Robotics should request a per-store monthly quote against their own SKU count, because that is the only number that settles the business case.
The grocery store robots guide covers the wider category Tally competes in, and the service robot companies page lists who else is building machines for retail floors.
FAQs
Who is the CEO of Simbe Robotics?
Brad Bogolea is co-founder and chief executive of Simbe Robotics. He has held the role since the company was founded in 2014 and brought the first Tally robot to market in November 2015.
Who founded Simbe Robotics?
Simbe Robotics was founded in 2014 by Brad Bogolea, Jeff Gee, and Mirza Shah. Gee and Shah were engineers at Willow Garage, the Menlo Park lab that produced the ROS software framework. Gee is now chief design officer.
How much funding has Simbe Robotics raised?
More than $100 million in disclosed equity across three rounds. Venrock led a $26 million Series A in September 2019 and Eclipse led a $28 million Series B in July 2023. Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives led a $50 million Series C in October 2024. SoftBank Robotics also provided separate inventory financing in 2019.
What is Simbe Robotics worth?
Simbe Robotics does not publish a valuation. It is a private company with no public share price, so the figures circulating on data-provider sites are third-party estimates rather than disclosures. The same applies to any net-worth number attached to a founder.
How much does a Simbe Tally robot cost?
Simbe does not publish a price. Tally is sold as a monthly per-store subscription with no upfront cost, and the fee varies with store size, SKU count, and whether RFID is included. The Spoon reported $2,000 to $4,000 per store per month in October 2020 for the older Tally 3.0.
Which stores use Simbe's Tally robot?
Named deployments include BJ's Wholesale Club across all 237 clubs, Schnuck Markets chainwide, more than 90 ShopRite stores, SPAR Austria, and Harmons. Simbe said Tally served close to 60 retailers in 10 countries as of November 2025.
Primary Sources
- Simbe: Tally product page and published performance figures
- Simbe: customer FAQ (scan rate, store size, pricing model)
- Simbe: Tally 4.0 announcement, January 12, 2026
- Simbe: ten years of Tally (44.8B shelf photos, 600M gaps, 10 countries)
- Simbe: $50M Series C led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives
- Simbe: $28M Series B led by Eclipse
- BJ's Wholesale Club: partnership with Simbe (investor release)
- CNBC: Walmart ends contract with robotics company Bossa Nova
- The Spoon: Simbe announces Tally 3.0 (2020 subscription range)