This week saw explosive U.S. growth by rewards platform ShopBack, which entered the American market in 2025, while Swap Commerce has made a strategic AI acquisition. ShipStation announced a new Walmart integration, Ascerta said it won $18 million in “Series A” funding and Geekplus said it is doing a massive robotic expansion in Poland to better serve fashion brands there.

Lastly, Birdstop entered into a partnership with TSPS Inc., a specialized truck parking and lot management company, in order to introduce AI-driven, fully autonomous drone monitoring at commercial trucking facilities.

ShopBack sees explosive growth

ShopBack, the shopping and rewards platform, just reached a key milestone. The mobile-first app, which has more than 20 million active users across 13 markets, said its U.S. gross merchandise value, or GMV, grew a whopping 373 percent in the first nine months of this year, while during the same period, monthly active users more than doubled.

The platform launched in the U.S. in 2025.

In the U.S., ShopBack works with retailers, marketplaces and brands such as Booking.com, Sam’s Club, DoorDash, Ulta and Nike. “Unlike points-based rewards programs, ShopBack gives users real cashback that can be transferred directly to their bank accounts through ACH or PayPal,” the company said in a statement, adding that its gives brands a direct way to reward shoppers who choose them, “while helping consumers earn real cashback on purchases they already planned to make.”

The platform said its growth reflects rising adoption of cashback among value-conscious Americans, “particularly Gen Z and Millennial shoppers who are combining rewards, promotions and other savings as part of the way they shop.” The company said users in the U.S. now complete an average of six shopping trips per month through the platform, “while average monthly user spend has increased more than 70 percent over the same period,” the company said.

Globally, the platform has dished out $900 million in cashback returned to shoppers across 13 markets. ShopBack said its highest-spending U.S. users have earned up to $12,000 in cashback.

Carolina Paradas, general manager of North America at ShopBack, said U.S. consumers “are becoming more intentional about every purchase, and younger consumers are leading that shift.”

“They already shop mobile-first, move across platforms, and stack savings in real time, and rewards should be just as dynamic, useful and connected to how they buy,” Paradas said. “The growth we are seeing in the U.S. shows that ShopBack is meeting that moment by giving shoppers real value back through everyday purchases.”

Swap Commerce acquires Vizby

Swap Commerce said it is acquiring Vizby, an artificial intelligence visibility platform that is native to Shopify and that is designed to monitor and optimize a brand’s presence across a number of major AI services, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Microsoft Copilot.

The company said the acquisition will enable Swap Commerce to extend its agentic commerce technology into the area of early-stage product discovery, building on its current “Storefront” and “Checkout+” tools to produce a single, integrated platform covering the whole shopping journey. The technology behind Vizby will be used to power “Swap Discovery,” a new front-end visibility feature that will assist online merchants in improving the way their products are recommended, searched for and purchased via conversational AI platforms.

The launch of the platform responds to a change in the industry toward AI-powered shopping, as a recent joint study by Swap Commerce and Digiday has found that 62 percent of the brands surveyed regard improved discovery as their top priority in the area of agentic commerce. Swap Discovery works directly inside Shopify to create structured data, schema, editorial content and agents.md files in order to enhance product listings for use with high-intent AI prompts.

Unlike ordinary reporting tools, this platform also tracks actual financial results by providing revenue attribution at the SKU level to show which products consumers discover and purchase through the use of AI assistants.

The initial versions of Vizby’s technology have already led to tangible business benefits. For example, Vigo Industries, the home goods retailer set up in 2023 by Sam Atkinson and Zach Bailet, experienced a 91.3 percent increase in AI-powered sessions just two weeks after the technology was deployed.

Swap Commerce provides backend e-commerce services to more than 1,000 global brands covering areas such as returns, tax compliance and cross-border logistics, and by combining its discovery features with its main processing engine the company intends to assist merchants in capturing conversational search intent and turning it into fulfilled deliveries all on the same platform.

ShipStation launches Walmart solution

ShipStation has introduced “Ship with Walmart,” a new shipping service that enables sellers on the Walmart Marketplace to take advantage of carrier rates that have been negotiated with Walmart directly through the ShipStation platform. The company said the integration is intended to simplify operations for merchants who operate on multiple sales channels, as it allows them to buy shipping labels that are eligible, gain access to up to $100 in seller protection for lost packages and keep their performance metrics all without having to leave their usual workflow.

The service works in conjunction with the seller’s existing carrier accounts and combines orders from the Walmart Marketplace with those from other channels such as Amazon, Shopify and TikTok Shop in a single dashboard.

The solution is now available for domestic shipments within the U.S. and is intended to assist sellers in safeguarding their operating margins as well as in enhancing delivery performance. In order to promote its use, new ShipStation customers who choose to activate Ship with Walmart will be given a 20 percent discount on their annual subscription.

“For sellers on the Walmart Marketplace, every operational advantage is important, and shipping is one of the main factors they have for protecting their margins and delivery performance,” said Matt Norman, vice president of strategic business development at ShipStation. He said the tool provides the value that has been negotiated directly within the software that sellers use every day.

Birdstop and TSPS roll out drone monitoring

The drone company Birdstop, which is based in Michigan, has entered into a partnership with TSPS Inc., a specialized truck parking and lot management company, in order to introduce AI-driven, fully autonomous drone monitoring at commercial trucking facilities in Detroit.

The system will take aerial images and telemetry data, analyzing them using AI and computer vision models to monitor the movement of trucks and identify vacant parking spaces in real time. The project is being funded by the Michigan Mobility Funding Platform, which is managed by NextEnergy in cooperation with the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification. It is focused on one of the busiest freight corridors in the country close to the U.S.-Canada border.

The company said the pilot is dealing with the ongoing nationwide problem of inadequate truck parking, which leads to driver fatigue, operational inefficiencies and safety risks on major freight routes. The program provides a more scalable and cost-effective solution than traditional fixed sensors by combining flexible aerial sensing with TSPS’s visualization platform.

In the future, the partners said they intend to assess the system’s performance and cost advantages so as to extend the drone network along national transportation corridors, establishing a flexible infrastructure that may one day be used for state road maintenance, emergency response and other broader intelligent transit operations.

Ascerta gets funding from Dell Technologies Capital

Ascerta, which was previously called Pay-i, has announced a $18 million “Series A” funding round with Dell Technologies Capital acting as the lead investor, bringing the company’s total funds to $22.9 million.

The company was founded in 2024 by three Microsoft veterans—David Tepper, Doron Holan and Erik Winters—and made its public debut in 2025 with a focus on AI cost management. Together with the funding, the company changed its name to Ascerta in order to widen its scope from simply monitoring costs to covering the full lifecycle of enterprise-level AI management.

The new round of funding will go toward expanding the capabilities of its platform and scaling its go-to-market team, as well as increasing the range of its integrations with enterprise AI tools.

Ascerta’s platform offers businesses a central system which they can use to measure the cost, the level of adoption, and the actual return on investment associated with their artificial intelligence deployments.

Geekplus scales warehouse automation in Poland

Geekplus, which provides robotics for warehouses, has expanded its partnership with LPP Logistics, part of LPP Group, the fashion retailers, in order to introduce “intelligent warehouse automation” throughout the company’s fulfilment operations in Poland.

At two major sites, the system makes use of more than 1,600 autonomous robots—comprising RoboShuttle and P-series models—to handle 1.4 million automatic high-bay storage positions that go up to 12 meters in height. The solution, which aims to simplify high-volume fashion logistics and deal with peak seasonal demand, features a scalable infrastructure that is controlled by a single robot management system in order to boost flow efficiency and throughput while at the same time reducing “integration complexity,” the company said.

The collaborative automation model combines the use of robotics with human supervision, which cuts down on the need for repetitive manual tasks and the amount of physical walking for employees so that they can instead concentrate on monitoring the system and dealing with any exceptions.

Executives from both companies stressed that the strategic implementation results in measured efficiency improvements of 99 per cent and better inventory tracking, while also providing the operational flexibility needed to keep up with changing retail product lines.