Caper

Caper (caper.ai) is a New York-founded computer-vision company that builds AI-powered smart shopping carts and cashierless checkout technology for grocery and retail. Its Caper Cart uses a set of onboard cameras and deep-learning object recognition, running on NVIDIA Jetson edge AI, to auto-detect items as shoppers add them and let customers skip the checkout line. Founded in 2016 (Y Combinator) by Lindon Gao and team, Caper was acquired by Instacart in 2021 for roughly $350M and now operates as part of the Instacart Enterprise Platform (Connected Stores), deployed with retailers including ALDI and Coles. Caper ships retail hardware and an internal edge/vision platform; it does not publish a public developer API, OpenAPI, SDKs, or a developer portal.

Caper is profiled on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Retail, Grocery, Computer-Vision, and Smart Cart.

Caper’s developer surface includes engineering blog and 2 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Source on GitHub

0.9/100 minimal ▬ flat Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-08-25 · rubric v0.14.0

0 APIs

Company Retail Grocery Computer-VisionSmart CartCashierless CheckoutEdge AIInstacart

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-08-25 · rubric v0.14.0

Composite quality — 0.9/100 · minimal

Contract Quality 0.0 / 21

Developer Ergonomics 0.4 / 17

Access Clarity 0.0 / 17

Operational Transparency 0.3 / 11

Contract Governance 0.0 / 10

Discoverability 4.3 / 9

Regulatory Posture 0.0 / 15

Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Surface 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Payments regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/caper: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Want it done for you? Prioritized profiling — $2,500 →

Resources

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

Company 2

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

Blog

Blog

Source (apis.yml)

aid: caper
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/caper.png
name: Caper
description: Caper (caper.ai) is a New York-founded computer-vision company that builds AI-powered smart shopping carts and
  cashierless checkout technology for grocery and retail. Its Caper Cart uses a set of onboard cameras and deep-learning object
  recognition, running on NVIDIA Jetson edge AI, to auto-detect items as shoppers add them and let customers skip the checkout
  line. Founded in 2016 (Y Combinator) by Lindon Gao and team, Caper was acquired by Instacart in 2021 for roughly $350M and
  now operates as part of the Instacart Enterprise Platform (Connected Stores), deployed with retailers including ALDI and
  Coles. Caper ships retail hardware and an internal edge/vision platform; it does not publish a public developer API, OpenAPI,
  SDKs, or a developer portal.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/caper/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- y-combinator
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
x-enrichment:
  last_run: '2026-07-18'
  status: no-public-api
  note: Physical smart-cart / cashierless-checkout hardware company, now Instacart Enterprise Platform. Searched caper.ai,
    developer/api/docs subdomains, and the CaperAi GitHub org; no public API surface, OpenAPI, SDKs, packages, or webhooks
    found. developer.caper.ai and api.caper.ai do not resolve; docs.caper.ai returns 401 (auth-walled, non-public).
x-acquired-by: instacart
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-18'
tags:
- Company
- Retail
- Grocery
- Computer-Vision
- Smart Cart
- Cashierless Checkout
- Edge AI
- Instacart
tags_raw:
- Company
- Retail
- Grocery
- Computer Vision
- Smart Cart
- Cashierless Checkout
- Edge AI
- Instacart
apis: []
common:
- type: Website
  url: https://www.caper.ai/
- type: Blog
  url: https://www.caper.ai/blog
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/CaperAi
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io

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