Glendale just dropped a move the grocery world can’t ignore. LocalExpress, the AI-native unified commerce platform built for food retailers without Amazon’s billions or Walmart’s army of engineers, just secured $6.2 million in venture funding. The round was led by OXZ Capital out of Singapore, stepping outside Asia for the first time and planting their flag in retail tech. This isn’t just capital, it’s LocalExpress leveling up from powering stores to syndicating the data that drives them.
Founded in 2017, LocalExpress was built on a blunt truth: independents and regional grocers were bleeding market share because their tech couldn’t keep up. CEO and Co-Founder Bagrat Safarian brought the engineering brain and Wall Street finance edge, turning physics and corporate strategy into execution. COO and Co-Founder Tigran Zograbyan knew how to scale operations where complexity usually kills. CPO and CMO and Co-Founder Armen Danielian brought product instincts sharpened by e-commerce battles and exits that spoke in revenue, not hype. Together they built a platform now serving over 300 regional and specialty banners across the US, Canada, and Latin America, powering chains with as many as 1,000 stores and thousands of online orders daily.
LocalExpress is more than online carts. Its Grocery AI Data Fusion harmonizes millions of transactions into something usable, personalized merchandising, prepared foods at scale, fulfillment that doesn’t buckle under pressure. POS, self-serve kiosks, EBT support, loyalty, coupons, retail media, last-mile with over 100 delivery providers, it’s all there, stitched together with proprietary AI that cleans and connects grocery data like nobody else.
This round matters because it funds the pivot. LocalExpress isn’t just running independents’ operations anymore, it’s becoming the industry’s data syndication hub. “Zapier for grocery data” isn’t a tagline, it’s the infrastructure play that lets a chain in Oklahoma or Puerto Rico run with the same intelligence as the national heavyweights. Homeland Supermarkets HAC, Inc. proved it by deploying across 47 stores. ECONO in Puerto Rico validated it at scale.
Sixty employees worldwide keep it tight. CTO Alexey Goliatin drives the tech, while VP of Product Marketing Stan Byun sharpens positioning and reach. The leadership team is calibrated for scale, not noise.
So yes, $6.2 million is a funding headline. But it’s also OXZ Capital betting that independents deserve intelligence at enterprise scale. LocalExpress is shifting from checkout lines to pipelines, pipelines of data that will decide which grocers hold ground and which quietly disappear.
