SBJ Power Up: A deep dive into checkout-free tech

Welcome back to Power Up. What an absolutely amazing College Football Playoff championship game. The old beat writer in me is always melancholy at the end of the college football season, but what a high note to end on. — Ethan Joyce

In today’s edition of Power Up:

• The state of the checkout-free industry
• OneCourt named finalist for SXSW Pitch Competition
• LED provider GoVision makes three C-suite promotions

The Tennessee Titans raised sports industry eyebrows in early 2026 when they announced the new Nissan Stadium’s concessions would be completely checkout-free.

For people outside the venue operations or food and beverage worlds, it was an exotic bit of news, a novelty worth keeping an eye on. But the implications for the technology, its providers and the venues that might use checkout-free are bigger than eliminating beer lines in Nashville.

The $2.2 billion Nissan Stadium will open in 2027 with 52 Amazon Just Walk Out stores, becoming the second fully checkout-free venue after the Clippers’ Intuit Dome. It’s the biggest referendum yet on whether the checkout-free store concept, which has endured a roller-coaster journey since first appearing in sports venues in 2019, can go mainstream.

Unlike Intuit Dome, which was privately funded by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and unconstrained by public accountability, Nissan Stadium was largely paid for with public money. Its 60,000 capacity is more than triple Intuit Dome’s, but it will host one-fifth as many home dates and far fewer concerts. NFL stadium per-cap spending nearly doubles NBA arena per-caps, leaving less room for operational error. The financial and reputational risk is shared by Amazon, with Nissan Stadium representing the company’s largest single-venue deployment.

The Titans’ decision offers a high-profile chance to confirm what some technologists and building operators already believe: Checkout-free concessions are the present and future for sports venues.

“This is the next step and generation in how we distribute food and beverage to our fans,” said Andrew McIntyre, Titans senior vice president of technology and innovation. “It’s always about removing lines, removing pain points, getting people what they want as quickly as possible.”

Hundreds of checkout-free stores by Amazon, AiFi and Zippin, the tech’s three main providers, opened across the U.S. and internationally during the last five years. Operators report higher throughput, increased order values, repeat usage, reduced queues and the ability to redistribute labor elsewhere.

The technology, in which customers tap their payment to enter a camera-rigged store, grab their items, then exit, feels ascendant. Yet others in the industry still aren’t fully convinced. They cite issues ranging from wonky — data reporting can be slow, a critical issue in busy arenas — to obvious — the stores require a construction project, making them slower and more expensive to complete than other sports venue commerce technologies.

And most sports fans still don’t see the stores in their daily lives. Self-checkout kiosks, in contrast, are found everywhere from grocery stores and gas stations to McDonald’s and Walmart. Humans are taught, essentially from birth, to pay at the end of a transaction, so checkout-free stores can require not only education, but gradual brain rewiring.

Deployments mostly have been incremental, often looking like Charlotte’s recently renovated Spectrum Center, which expanded from two Amazon Just Walk Out stores to four. That slow rate of change puts extra importance on the coming spate of stadiums and arenas, which represent rare opportunities to take bigger leaps forward.

“I’m amazed — really, truly surprised — that every venue doesn’t have 10, 20 or 30 of these. Because they crush it, 50, 60, 70% lift on per-caps in those locations,” said veteran sports industry executive Gary Jacobus, who was Zippin’s senior vice president of business development from 2020 to 2022. “The adoption, it’s there, but it’s slower than I thought it’d be.”

Pivotal years

Self-checkout technology’s journey to widespread adoption, which took decades following its 1986 invention, offers a caution to anyone ready to write off checkout-free. Riding in part on an idea cemented by self-checkout — that a customer’s shopping experience doesn’t need to involve another human — checkout-free is already showing large-scale promise less than a decade into its existence.

“We’re having a lot of discussions about 10-, 15-, 20-store launches in some of the existing venues, which highlights the demand,” said Dan Gallery, president of Gallery, which builds stores for the checkout-free providers. “The naysayers used to say, ‘Hey, what are fans going to do, it’s too expensive, we don’t understand it …’ I think all those naysayers and the skeptics have been proven wrong in many ways.”

The question with checkout-free is whether the three main companies involved can survive long enough for the tech to reach mainstream adoption. They each have clear and potentially fatal issues.

Zippin, the early front-runner, is cash-flow positive, according to its CEO Krishna Motukuri, but has fallen back and likely needs investment soon to remain competitive. Its momentum was rocked by major layoffs in 2023. Last year, its two biggest sports venue deployments, at Empower Field at Mile High and Allegiant Stadium, were converted to Amazon Just Walk Out and AiFi.

Like Zippin, AiFi, which was responsible for Intuit Dome’s groundbreaking checkout-free concessions setup, is a true startup with all the inherent risk that carries. Despite adding stores at Allegiant Stadium and SoFi Stadium in the last year, many in the industry worry that the company has been stretched too thin by the Intuit Dome undertaking.

And then there is Amazon Just Walk Out, whose biggest threat has been its own parent company.

Just Walk Out represents a fraction of Amazon’s overall $600 billion-plus revenue and was pulled out of the company’s grocery stores in 2024 because the tech was hugely expensive in larger stores and wasn’t well received by shoppers. That very public blow to Just Walk Out sent a confusing mixed message to the sports world about Amazon’s long-term intentions for the technology.

Yet, as important as the Titans’ checkout-free choice is for the technology’s future, it said something just as noteworthy: This is Amazon’s game to lose.

“By its nature, Amazon is a very large, well-funded, successful organization we know is going to be around for the long haul,” McIntyre said.

Between Amazon’s emergence and a potential winnowing of the tech providers; checkout-free’s continued growth and adoption; and a raft of new multibillion-dollar venues on the horizon, the next few years will be pivotal for checkout-free and its providers.

“By the end of 2028, 2029,” said Adam Haker, Retailcloud vice president of sales, sports and entertainment, “we’ll have a really good understanding if there is going to be the same three players,” he said.

Checkout-free’s beginning

The pace of technological advancement is so disorienting that it’s easy to forget checkout-free stores have only been in sports venues since 2019, when Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center opened a Zippin store.

Amazon Just Walk Out’s unfortunately-timed pro sports debut came next, in March 2020 at United Center and TD Garden. More store deployments followed in the wake of the pandemic, aided by the later-disproven theory that touchless technologies could prevent the spread of COVID.

AiFi, backed by its investor, Verizon, deployed its first store at Ford Field in 2022. The company’s flexibility in allowing venue clients to purchase their own cameras for use in the AiFi store setup reduced costs and was well received.

Zippin was the clear early leader. An Empower Field at Mile High store deployment led to a 42% increase in transactions during peak periods of the 2021 Broncos season, and the venue registered the highest transaction rate per attendee of any sports venue in Aramark’s portfolio.

At its peak, Zippin had 150 stores across multiple industries, including 90 in sports venues. It helped push the technology forward by expanding beyond selling packaged snacks and drinks to serving hot food, and bringing down the cost and time required to deploy stores.

The stores range from low five figures to a couple of hundred thousand dollars, depending on the size and shape, cost of construction and the provider. Motukuri said that by late 2025, capital expenditure installation and deployment costs for Zippin stores were one-fifth of what they were in 2021, while the company’s software as a service fees have dropped in unison with cloud computing costs.

Minor details, such as using different types of gates that didn’t require drilling into a concourse floor, or ditching shelf sensors, also reduced overall costs, as did creative store layouts and formats. Many stores shrank to a mere 125 to 150 square feet, yet produced $8,000 to $10,000 in sales revenue per game. The time needed for return on investment, while varying by store, also shrank.

“I’d say the tech was very raw, nowhere near where it is today,” said Jamie Slotterback, Aramark Sports + Entertainment vice president of strategy and customer experience design. “And taking the risk and understanding the costs associated with that was a giant leap for us.”

Concessionaires and teams were making those initial leaps with the startups due to Amazon’s intractability. Amazon required sports clients to operate within its tech environment, played hardball with data, was inflexible on hardware and didn’t integrate with sports clients’ other tech partners — including, most crucially, loyalty providers, leaving season-ticket members unable to use their concessions perks. The inflexibility contributed to Amazon losing the Intuit Dome job, which was taken over by AiFi in late 2022.

“In the sports tech world, especially in the venue space, if you don’t have those integrations with loyalty, stored value, mobile wallet partners, you’re kind of wasting your time,” said Haker, who was with payments provider SpotOn before joining Retailcloud.

A rough patch

Amazon dominates American e-commerce to such an extent that it’s rarely forced to play well with others. But the startup competitors’ nimbleness forced it to shift gears. That began in 2022 with Just Walk Out’s move from the company’s physical retail unit (which included Whole Foods and Amazon Go stores) to Amazon Web Services’ umbrella. AWS, which produced more than half of Amazon’s 2024 operating income ($39.8 billion), was an ideal lucrative third-party licensed business for Just Walk Out to imitate.

Amazon created 24/7 Just Walk Out monitoring and offered hardware upgrades at no cost, important with a constantly developing technology. It’s notable that in 2026, the Titans picked Amazon in part because of its willingness to integrate with other key tech providers.

“Originally, Amazon was more black box,” said McIntyre. “They’ve come back around and said, ‘We know there are other strong technology providers in this market that we need to work with, not against, to really drive that fan experience.’”

While the pandemic helped spark checkout-free’s sports business, the resulting inflation hit venue operators’ capital expenditure budgets in 2022, cooling growth. Motukuri said Zippin projected a “big increase in scale” headed into that year, but it didn’t materialize and the company made significant staffing cuts, laying off 30% of its staff.

“The challenge is when you’re in a startup mode, your investors expect explosive growth, where in four years you’re 10 times your investment,” said Jacobus, “and it’s not growing as fast as some startups.”

Zippin lacked the strategic and capital support of Verizon, one of sports’ most pervasive sponsors, or Amazon Web Services that could have opened doors to potential clients or enabled bundling of services and lower pricing.

Around the same time, self-checkout emerged as a cheaper and quicker way to get similar throughput and labor benefits. Self-checkout was more familiar to customers, without the perceived friction of tapping payment to enter a store.

“In our view, the fan experience hasn’t significantly improved compared to a well-designed grab-and-go market,” said Food Service Matters’ Mike Plutino, a sports venue food and beverage industry consultant, who nonetheless is an ardent advocate of the various types of modern food and beverage markets.

As original issues were solved, new ones came to the fore, such as the technology’s lag in data reporting and reconciliation, which drove CFOs zany and made life harder for venue operators.

Even Amazon wasn’t immune to the turbulence. Just Walk Out’s issues stemmed from its own company’s decisions, namely the removal of the technology from Amazon’s grocery stores in April 2024. That was a tough story for the company to spin: why sports venue operators should believe in Just Walk Out when Amazon seemed not to.

The uncertainty continued through 2024, when a handful of key executives involved were assigned new roles or left the company, including Dilip Kumar, the co-creator of Just Walk Out technology, who previously led the division but left in the spring of 2024, and Jon Jenkins, who had direct oversight of the Just Walk Out group and left that October to become CTO for Lime, the scooter company.

The tumultuous year left the sports world with questions about Amazon’s long-term Just Walk Out strategy.

“I don’t see it,” said a source. “They got out of the bigger stores completely. What’s in it for them?”

Built to last?

Intuit Dome opened in August 2024, showing off more than 40 checkout-free concessions and retail stores spanning more than 100,000-plus square feet and integrated with biometric access systems. It was a crowning moment for AiFi, the overachieving startup that based its employees at an L.A. crash pad while they built the arena’s novel food and beverage system. And it was a signature moment for an industry in need of a milestone.

“We got a very, massive inbound,” after the arena opened, AiFi’s CEO J.D. Falcão said. “[Intuit Dome] was one of the best things that could have happened for AiFi and the sports business.”

AiFi has turned its Intuit Dome deployment into growth at other marquee venues, including at SoFi Stadium, where it has four stores, and Allegiant Stadium, where food and beverage provider Oak View Group converted 10 former Zippin stores.

But while Intuit Dome generated conversation and curiosity, it doesn’t appear to be opening the checkout-free floodgates in the way many thought it could. The cost and Clippers/Steve Ballmer-specific nature of the tech — like other aspects of the impressive building, including its video board — make it almost irreplicable.

More typical is Spectrum Center, the 20-year-old, city-owned home of the Charlotte Hornets, which completed a $245 million renovation in October. Donna Julian, executive vice president and chief venues officer for Hornets Sports & Entertainment, experimented with a Zippin stand on the main concourse but opted for Just Walk Out, which lifted transaction volume 25%.

“We don’t have them everywhere,” she said. “Every fan’s journey is different.”

It was a deployment that’s more emblematic of the industry’s step-by-step progress. Is that pace of growth enough to sustain all three companies?

It’s a question most pertinent for Zippin. Its CEO, Motukuri, said remaining cash-flow positive had been “a major focus,” since its 2022 spate of layoffs, and it continued to add stores in 2025 at Petco Park, NRG Stadium and Capital One Arena. That’s despite only raising $35 million in its entire history, with its last funding raise three years ago.

“We wanted to pace our fundraising with the growth we were seeing. And it helped us a lot, because otherwise we would have been gone by now,” Motukuri said. “We will add more resources; no doubt about it.”

But the investing environment is much more conservative in 2026 than when the three companies were first generating interest in 2021, said Retailcloud President and CTO Rupak Anto.

That’s an existential issue for the two startups because checkout-free is an expensive business. CNBC reported that in just 2019 and 2020, Amazon spent a billion dollars on Just Walk Out research and development. Checkout-free tech startup Grabango was launched in 2016 by the founder of the Pandora music service but went out of business in 2023 despite raising close to $100 million, while Standard AI has raised $266 million but couldn’t establish a checkout-free store business and pivoted toward solving other retail problems. Neither company got into sports venues.

“In 2025, [venture capitalists], family offices, private equity firms, they are looking at how sustainable the tech is, how much investment is required, whether the company is profitable or has a path to profitability,” said Anto. There “are a lot of other factors, not just burning the cash. Burning the cash was a cool thing at one point in time. I don’t think it is anymore.”

Most industry observers believe the market cannot sustain AiFi, Amazon and Zippin indefinitely, though they hope at least two remain.

“Is there a day that there is consolidation?” Jacobus said. “I would think so.”

Pulling away

Each company has stores in other verticals, including airports, hospitals, convention centers and university settings, but clearly needs more to solidify its business.

Based on back-of-the-napkin math, Jacobus thinks it’s likely these companies are generating lower eight-figure annual revenue. As one sports venue tech executive told SBJ, “Sports is a natural entry place, but the last place you want to land.” That’s a problem for checkout-free companies, because their business has been concentrated in sports and hasn’t penetrated daily life yet.

“That’s the existential crisis for these companies,” the sports venue tech executive added. “The sports market is not big enough.”

That makes the current sports venue building boom an almost existential pursuit, especially for AiFi and Zippin. New NFL stadiums coming in Cleveland; Washington, D.C.; Denver; and Kansas City, Kansas, as well as the A’s baseball stadium in Las Vegas, and new arenas in Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and San Antonio, constitute, conservatively, $20 billion worth of investment. Each represents an opportunity for a 40- to 60-store, fully checkout-free venue.

New stadium deployments are the most cost efficient for teams, venues and concessionaires because the same contractors building the venue can construct the store shells. While it has gotten easier to deploy checkout-free stores during the last five or six years, many in the industry think it could be much easier still.

“The party that’s going to win is the one that can truly make this a product,” said the source who has worked with all three companies. “Right now, it’s a technology solution with construction and design and all this other stuff. I think the person that wins brings it together in one product.”

It’s another idea that points toward Amazon domination: It is innately capable of productizing checkout-free technology and making a store kit another item sold on Amazon.com.

“When you look at those three parties, you have two horses leading it, Amazon and AiFi, and Zippin dropping off,” said the person who’s worked with each of the checkout-free providers. “You have the behemoth in Amazon, who is really starting to listen to clients, really driving down the simplification, and at that point, with that amount of capital backing them, it’s hard to beat.”

That proved true in Nashville.

The Titans put 12 checkout-free stores — a combination of AiFi and Zippin — in their existing Nissan Stadium to test the tech and help fans build familiarity. Zippin fell by the wayside during the Titans’ RFP process, owing to the smaller size of its current store deployments, which left AiFi and Amazon as the remaining contenders.

AiFi had the only full sports venue deployment on its résumé, but Amazon’s overall strength proved more important for the Titans as they pondered the risk of becoming the largest sports venue to take its concessions’ physical footprint completely checkout-free.

If Intuit Dome was the moon landing for checkout-free stores, proving that an entirely checkout-free sports venue could work, then a successful new Nissan Stadium deployment will take the technology and the companies providing it one giant step closer to mainstream.

“I really think this is about whether we’ve crossed from the pilot phase, trying it out, into a fully scalable solution set for sports and entertainment,” said Gallery.

Market share breakdown

Approximate totals of sports venue checkout-free stores

Amazon Just Walk Out: 142

AiFi: 133

Zippin: 55

Source: SBJ Research

Vendor files

AiFi

• Year founded: 2016
• Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
• Top executive: CEO João Diogo Falcão
• Employees: 101-205
• Fundraising/investment: $87.1M

Amazon Just Walk Out

• Year founded: 2013
• Headquarters: Seattle
• Top executive: VP of Just Walk Out, AWS Rajiv Chopra
• Employees: N/A
• Fundraising/investment: part of publicly traded Amazon

Zippin

• Year founded: 2018
• Headquarters: Remote
• Top executive: CEO Krishna Motukuri
• Employees: 100
• Fundraising/investment: $35 million

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OneCourt is an alum of the NBA Launchpad program and works with the Trail Blazers, Suns, Kings, Nets, Clippers, and Nuggets. They have also deployed in baseball (the 2023 MLB All-Star Game and a partnership with the Diamondbacks) and soccer (Lumen Field and Mercedes-Benz Stadium).

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Kristy Johnston, already the company’s CFO, has also been named the Chief Administrative Officer. Both Johnston and Williams have been with the company since 2007.

GoVision has supported various large sporting events like Final Fours and the Ryder Cup. The company also supported the renovations at Sutter Health Park as it became the temporary home for the Athletics.

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