Co-leading Veesion’s Series B: Redefining Retail Security Through AI
Empowering retailers worldwide with smarter loss prevention and physical space analytics
Retail's Hidden Margin Crisis
Imagine owning a thriving retail store. Every day, customers browse your aisles, select products, and complete purchases. Yet alongside these genuine shoppers, unnoticed individuals regularly slip items into their pockets or bags. These incidents range from minor pilferage to substantial, organised theft, resulting in significant financial damage. Despite hiring security guards and investing heavily in CCTV systems, theft persists, severely eroding profits and undermining operational efficiency.
Surprisingly, the culprits behind these thefts are often not who retailers traditionally expect. Middle-class shoplifting has seen a marked increase, symbolised by the phenomenon referred to as "The Rise of the Parmesan Bandit" (Business Insider). This issue reflects a deeper societal shift impacting retail globally. Retailers worldwide lose approximately $120 billion annually to shrinkage, with the U.S. alone contributing about $50 billion in losses in 2024 (InVue, 2024).
Despite the global presence of over 1.2 billion CCTV cameras, studies show that after just 20 minutes of continuous monitoring, human CCTV operators can miss up to 95% of screen activity, demonstrating that manual monitoring alone is insufficient and highlighting the essential role of AI in enhancing surveillance effectiveness (Umbocv).
Enter Veesion
Founded in Paris in 2018, Veesion integrates seamlessly into existing retail camera systems, instantly recognising suspicious gestures using sophisticated artificial intelligence. The technology is renowned for its effortless installation process and intuitive interface, creating immediate value without the need for extensive hardware upgrades or complicated setups. Unlike indirect competitors such as Verkada or cashier-focused solutions like Everseen, Veesion directly enhances the effectiveness of existing security infrastructures.
Returning to our retailer scenario, once Veesion is deployed, employees receive instant alerts accompanied by concise video snippets whenever suspicious actions are detected. Crucially, Veesion incorporates human verification to effectively eliminate false positives, ensuring accuracy and maintaining customer privacy. Retailers can specifically select which suspicious gestures the AI prioritises, offering an unprecedented level of granularity. For instance, some stores might not prioritise alerts for customers using personal bags, thus significantly reducing irrelevant notifications.
Today, Veesion protects over 5,000 retail locations across 25 countries, including more than 500 stores in the United States, significantly reducing theft incidents. In one notable pilot, a single retailer intercepted on single theft attempt amounting to €50,000! (in multiple shops of a all, items included tech hardware, perfumes etc)
Beyond mere loss prevention, Veesion’s analytics provide actionable insights, allowing retailers to proactively modify store layouts, optimise staffing, and better understand theft patterns. These insights uncover unexpected perpetrators, including highly organised theft rings, thus enabling retailers to strategically strengthen their loss prevention efforts.
Privacy is at the core of Veesion's design philosophy. The company's technology prioritises privacy by never recording individuals' faces and exclusively analysing gesture-based movements, such as a hand grabbing a product toward a specific container, rather than identifying personal or contextual characteristics. Through extensive data augmentation techniques and rigorous testing on unbiased datasets, Veesion ensures that its algorithms remain free from contextual biases related to appearance, identity, or cultural specificity. Furthermore, no automated profiling or decision-making occurs without human oversight, meaning any actions taken based on the AI’s detections are solely the responsibility of a human decision-maker.
Our Journey with Veesion
My relationship with Veesion started 7 years ago: when I was finishing my studies in 2018, the Veesion founders reached out to recruit me as a freelance data annotator to train their AI models. It's fun that I'm now in the deal team leading the investment!
Throughout our analysis, we spoke extensively with retailers across both the US and Europe, each facing the stubborn and increasingly costly challenge of retail theft. Without exception, these retailers pointed to Veesion’s tangible return on investment as not merely compelling, but genuinely transformative, enabling them to shift their loss prevention strategies from reactive to proactive.
We also engaged closely with industry experts and specialists in computer vision technology. They consistently praised the pragmatic yet sophisticated approach taken by Veesion’s technical team, emphasising their mastery of complex data pipelines and their remarkable ability to extract high-performance insights from massive, real-world datasets. Indeed, Veesion’s technology benefits from an unparalleled dataset of over 5 million labeled theft incidents and 500 million sequences of regular shopper interactions, creating an exceptionally strong data network effect and formidable barriers to entry for competitors.
A decisive moment in our diligence was identifying the 'blue ocean' dimension of the market, an insight repeatedly confirmed by industry analysts and even candid competitor testimonies, who openly acknowledged significant challenges in matching Veesion’s capabilities. Market analyses further validated this immense opportunity, underscoring a global addressable market exceeding 4 million retail stores across diverse verticals such as grocery, pharmacy, clothing, electronics, and more, representing over billions in potential ARR!
Ultimately, it was the combination of technical validation, clear product-market fit, and overwhelmingly positive customer feedback that cemented our conviction. We're thrilled to support Veesion as it scales aggressively toward its ambition of becoming the leading global AI-powered solution in retail security and beyond.
Accelerating US Expansion and Becoming a Global Category Leader
Remarkably, Veesion has achieved substantial market penetration in the US, surpassing a million in ARR without a dedicated local team. We are now poised to rapidly accelerate their expansion in North America, a strategic move underscored by Benoit relocating to the United States. He will collaborate closely with our US Partners to execute critical hires and deepen market penetration. Meanwhile, in France, co-founder Thibault continues driving operational excellence and a highly data-centric strategy, further sharpening the product’s competitive edge.
Looking ahead, new product initiatives like slip-and-fall detection and crowd management functionalities promise to position Veesion as the comprehensive AI platform of choice for physical security and management. As the global number of installed cameras continues its exponential growth, Veesion's strategic roadmap focuses on leveraging this proliferation, aiming to become the dominant player in AI-driven physical space management.
We’re proud to co-lead this €35 million Series B round alongside our friends at Whitestar Capital, Bpifrance, and KPN Ventures. It’s been a real pleasure building this syndicate, not only because of the strength each partner brings to the table, but also because of how naturally and effectively we’ve been able to collaborate from the very start!
Joseph