Linear #177: Vori: The Grocery OS, Vertical GTM Workshop, Labor > Seats
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Shaped by lessons from growing and scaling 20+ vertical SaaS platforms, this guide explores what AI readiness actually means for software providers. Read the guide.
Vori: Vori just raised a Series B — and it’s a very important kind of vSaaS company
Most people will look at Vori and say: “grocery software.”
That is technically correct and strategically useless.
What Vori is really building is an operating system for independent grocers — one that sits across the front store, the back office, and increasingly the money flow itself. That matters because grocery is one of those giant, messy, low-glamour industries where software has historically lagged, margins are thin, labor is constant, and the best companies win by helping operators make dozens of tiny decisions better every single day.
The founder story
The company began in 2019 from an idea sparked by Brandon Hill, whose parents spent roughly 40 years in grocery and consumer products and saw firsthand how little the industry had modernized. That is exactly the kind of founder-market fit I pay attention to: not “we discovered a market in a spreadsheet,” but “we lived close enough to the pain to know the software was broken.”
And the early timeline has the right flavor.
The initial iOS app was built in 12 days. The first product was scanned in October 2019. The first wholesale order submitted through Vori was just $200 of kombucha. I love stories like that because they remind you that every vertical software companies rarely begin with giant visions in practice. They begin with one small workflow that matters deeply to one specific operator.
The wedge
Vori did not try to become “the everything platform for grocery” on day one.
The early heartbeat of the business was very operational: products getting scanned, orders getting written, inventory getting understood, stores getting a modern interface for core retail tasks. That is what good wedge products do. They enter through a daily pain point. They get adopted because they are useful, not because the founder has a grand theory of industry transformation.
In grocery, that makes even more sense.
Independent grocers do not have time for bloated implementation cycles or category theory. They need software that helps them order, stock, price, sell, and protect margin. Vori’s product stack reflects that reality: POS, integrated payments, hardware, shopper engagement, order management, pricing automation, inventory management, shrink tracking, and reporting. That is not just a software menu. That is a blueprint for owning the store’s operational surface area.
Going deep: the full-stack play
This is where the company gets interesting.
A lot of vertical software companies win one workflow and then stall. Vori appears to be doing the more ambitious thing: moving from a point solution into a full operating layer. On the front end, it handles checkout, payments, hardware, and shopper engagement. On the back end, it handles ordering, pricing, inventory, shrink, and reporting. And it has started positioning itself around business outcomes, not just features: grow sales, protect margins, optimize labor, expand market share, and modernize with confidence.
That framing is important.
The best vertical software companies eventually stop selling software categories and start selling business outcomes. Grocers do not wake up wanting “better reporting software.” They want fewer stockouts, faster checkout, better margins, less labor waste, and a stronger shot at competing with chains that have more scale. Vori seems to understand that the real product is not a dashboard. The real product is a better run store.
Why grocery is such a compelling vertical
The grocery market is enormous, but more importantly, it is operationally dense.
This is not a niche where a store manager touches software once a week. Grocery operators live inside pricing, replenishment, shrink, checkout, labor, assortment, customer traffic, and vendor relationships. The U.S. grocery market is roughly $1.5 trillion, with tens of thousands of supermarkets, and Vori is going after the independent side of that market — the operators that do not have Walmart-scale internal tooling but still have all the same operational complexity.
That is a classic vSaaS opportunity.
Big market. Fragmented customers. High workflow complexity. Real switching pain. Constant transactions. Embedded financial flows. Low tolerance for bad software. Those are the ingredients that tend to produce very durable vertical winners.
The payments angle is a big deal
The other reason this company matters: it is not just selling software.
Vori has integrated payments at the center of its offering, and that matters because the best vertical SaaS businesses eventually realize the same thing: once you are close enough to the transaction, software alone is not the full prize. One of the most important data points in Vori’s story is that payments reportedly represent roughly 60–70% of revenue, with more than $500 million processed across 55 cities and more than 1 million consumers served. If that continues, this becomes a very different kind of business than a plain subscription software company.
That is the part many founders still underestimate.
The software gets you into the workflow.
The payments layer monetizes the motion.
And once the money starts moving through your rails, your understanding of the business gets deeper, your margin profile improves, and your ability to launch adjacent products gets stronger.
The capital efficiency story
Vori’s new $22 million Series B was led by Cherryrock Capital, following a prior $10 million Series A in 2022. The company now has roughly $50 million in total funding and, based on recent reporting, expects very aggressive growth over the next two years.
I think this is exactly the right kind of company for this moment.
Not a generic AI wrapper.
Not a horizontal tool pretending to be vertical.
Not a software business with no path to owning payments, labor, or economic throughput.
Instead, this looks like a company attacking a massive and messy industry through real workflows, then expanding into deeper operational and financial control. That tends to age well.
The moat
If I had to summarize Vori’s moat in one sentence, it would be this:
They are not trying to be a prettier dashboard for grocers. They are trying to become the operating layer an independent grocer trusts to run core parts of the business.
And moats in vertical software usually get stronger when a company can do four things at once:
win a painful operational wedge
expand across adjacent workflows
sit close to the transaction
earn trust with a specific customer type over time
Vori checks a lot of those boxes already.
It also helps that the company is clearly built for specific grocery formats — supermarkets, meat markets, natural and organic stores, produce markets, and specialty food stores. That kind of vertical specificity matters. Generic software often breaks down in edge cases. Vertical software wins because it understands that the edge cases are the business.
What could happen next
The obvious next chapter is not “more features.”
It is deeper control over store economics.
If Vori keeps expanding across pricing, payments, inventory, shrink, reporting, and shopper engagement, it can move from software vendor to decision engine. That is where vertical software becomes very powerful. The more of the operational loop you touch, the more insight you gain into where margin leaks, where labor gets wasted, and where automation can actually improve outcomes.
And that is what makes Vori especially interesting in the AI era.
Grocery is full of “work,” not just “workflow.” Pricing decisions. Replenishment choices. Exception handling. Labor tradeoffs. Promotions. Shrink. Shopper behavior. If Vori becomes the place where those decisions get surfaced, tracked, and improved, it has a real shot at becoming far more valuable than “grocery POS software.”
Why this story matters for every founder reading this
There is a bigger lesson here.
The best vertical companies rarely start by announcing they are building an empire. They start by solving one ugly, high-frequency problem inside a market that outsiders overlook. Then they use that wedge to move deeper into the economic core of the customer.
That is the Vori playbook as I see it:
Start close to the operator
Win a painful daily workflow
Expand into adjacent systems
Own the transaction layer
Become the operating system for the vertical
It is a very textbook vSaaS move.
In Closing…
Vori is interesting for three reasons:
it is attacking a huge, fragmented, operationally complex market
it has expanded beyond software into payments and core business economics
it seems to understand that the real goal is not selling tools to grocers, but helping grocers run better stores
That is exactly the kind of company I want to study.
Because in vertical software, the biggest winners usually do not look flashy at first.
They just quietly become essential.
PS/quick disclosure — I am a tiny investor in Vori, but would write this the same regardless :-)
If you’re building in vertical software or vertical AI, we’re going to co-build your GTM playbook live on next week’s workshop.
Raj Bhaskar, Founder & CEO at Tight, and I are doing a live workshop with the CRO whisperer, Martin Roth, former CRO at Levelset (massive exit to Procore), where we’ll get into what actually works when you’re building GTM in a vertical market.
Martin has spent his 10,000 hours thinking deeply about vertical GTM. Not generic SaaS GTM. Not “copy what worked in PLG last year.” Vertical GTM.
The practical stuff.
The stuff that actually matters when you’re trying to sell into a market with weird buyer behavior, long trust cycles, fragmented channels, and a reality that doesn’t fit the standard playbook.
A few topics we plan to get into:
How to build a repeatable sales motion around the realities of your market instead of forcing a generic one onto it
Where most teams get stuck as they try to scale from founder-led sales into a real GTM engine
How great vertical companies shape their sales process around workflow, urgency, and buyer context instead of vanity SaaS rules
What founders and operators should be watching for as they try to create durable distribution in niche markets
If you’re a founder, operator, or investor thinking seriously about how vertical companies actually win distribution, this should be a good one.
Registration link: https://lnkd.in/eTnD_ETm
Limited to the first 25 vertical founders/operators.
Selling Seats vs. Selling Work
This framework is about to split the software market in two. In the old world, software sold into a software budget. It made a person faster. It gave the team better visibility. It organized the work. But at the end of the day, the human still did the job. In the new world, more and more products will move out of “helping” the worker and into actually doing meaningful chunks of the work itself.
Here’s the cleanest way I know to frame it:
the software budget = “we help your team work faster”
the labor budget = “we do the work”
That is the split. And it is a very big one.
If your product still needs the customer’s team to do the actual job, you will probably get priced like software. That means seats, modules, access, dashboards, admin controls, and maybe some nice upsell expansion if you execute well. Good business. Familiar playbook. Still very real.
If your product is reading the intake, structuring the mess, routing the case, drafting the output, escalating the exceptions, and improving over time, you are not really selling software anymore.
You are swallowing labor.
That is why some of the biggest AI companies are not going to look like normal SaaS businesses. They will look like strange hybrids: software on the surface, operations companies underneath. The UI may still look like software. The buyer may still think they are buying software. But the economic engine underneath is much closer to replacing labor than selling access.
And when you start looking at the world this way, the founder questions change.
The old question was: How much does this industry spend on software?
The new question is: How much labor spend exists around this workflow, and what percent of that can AI absorb?
This is where it gets VERY interesting.
Because seat-selling companies and work-selling companies optimize for very different things.
Seat sellers care about:
deployment
adoption
training
logins
expansion
renewal
Work sellers care about:
throughput
turnaround time
accuracy
exception handling
labor savings
margin creation
customer outcomes
The best AI-native companies will not win because they added a chatbot to the old workflow. They will win because they rebuilt the workflow around doing the work itself. In a lot of categories, the old moat was being the system of record. The new moat is becoming the system that helps the customer make money, save labor, and move faster.
So no, the prize is not “better seat expansion.”
The real prize is owning the work
Do me a solid and forward to a friend :-)