E-Commerce Platform Wynshop Acquires Grocery AI Pioneer Halla to Enhance the Digital Grocery Shopping Experience

Ft Lauderdale, FL – March 11, 2024 – Wynshop, the leading provider of digital commerce and fulfillment solutions for grocery and other local store-based retailers, announced today that it has acquired Halla, the leader in AI-driven personalization solutions specifically for grocery e-commerce. This further strengthens Wynshop’s commitment to providing its retail customers with cutting-edge technology and ease of use to enhance the digital grocery shopping experience. The Halla acquisition follows Wynshop’s divestiture of its Mi9 Retail business unit.

Launched in 2020, Halla’s personalization technology delivers recommendations, substitutions, and searches for thousands of grocery e-commerce storefronts. Grocers have historically relied on shopping trends, lagging sales data, intuition, or “people like you also bought” algorithms to predict what shoppers want. Unfortunately, these methods work poorly, and may even lead to negative outcomes like bad substitutions for out-of-stock incidents, which can drive up to 20% of grocery shoppers to competitors, according to McKinsey.

Halla’s approach uses purpose-built machine learning (ML) models with a highly specialized understanding of the biological, cultural, dietary, and sensory attributes that make grocery customers’ shopping goals unique. This has led to grocers experiencing significant increases in revenue, gross profit, loyalty, and customer satisfaction.

“Wynshop was built to harness granular data to fuel AI, crafting a distinct and personalized shopping experience for every consumer,” said Neil Moses, CEO of Wynshop. “After several years of research, and working with and implementing Halla with some of our joint customers, we decided that the Halla team was the perfect partner to execute our AI strategy. Wynshop’s customers will benefit immediately from our ability to apply AI to drive better consumer shopping experiences.”

Key highlights of the acquisition:

• Unprecedented Personalization: Halla’s proprietary technology leverages over 100 billion shopper and product data points to predict, with remarkable accuracy, what shoppers are actually looking for. Halla’s technology will be integrated into Wynshop’s existing suite of tools for browser-based and mobile applications, giving grocers and retailers more targeted and relevant personalization capabilities that improve digital shoppers’ entire experience.
• Future Innovation: Halla’s founders will join the Wynshop team and bring experience in applied ML, deep learning, and natural language processing that will speed time to value for current Wynshop customers and provide them with ongoing technology advantages for the future.
• Growth for Grocers and Store-based Retailers: The acquisition reinforces Wynshop’s strategic focus on helping grocers and other local store-based retailers grow wildly successful online businesses. The acquisition follows Wynshop’s divestiture of its Mi9 Retail unit and fortifies its unique support capabilities for its global customer base.

“Wynshop and Halla share a vision for transforming the grocery shopping experience through cutting-edge AI technology,” stated Spencer Price, CEO of Halla. “Together, our goal is to elevate customer shopping experiences, drive revenue, and foster loyalty. We look forward to extending Halla to a wider audience and advancing Wynshop’s AI capabilities to redefine digital commerce.”

Learn more about Halla Intelligence here.

About Wynshop

Wynshop is an ambitious team of digital innovators obsessed with a solitary mission—helping grocers and other local store-based retailers grow wildly successful online businesses. Its refreshingly easy-to-use digital commerce platform enables efficient in-house picking, reduces fulfillment costs, and gives retailers the ability to control every facet of their customers’ digital shopping experience. This results in a more personalized customer journey and amplified shopper loyalty. Learn more at wynshop.com.

About Halla

Halla is an AI company specializing in personalization technology for the grocery industry. Its proprietary relevance engine leverages deep learning to predict consumer preferences and drive personalized shopping experiences, helping retailers increase engagement and sales.