FOUNDER PROFILE

The founding of Alert Venture Foundry, whose business is to create startups, is the culmination of John Lert’s 50-year professional career of creating business value through disruptive technology innovation. Having majored in History with an eye towards becoming a lawyer, Lert instead chose business as a more creative field of work, earned an MBA, and began working in finance and operations. While working in his second job following grad school, he discovered his talent for envisioning technology solutions for business problems, when he invented and patented a computer-based system for tracking ads broadcast on tv. He licensed the invention to Nielsen Media and led the engineering team that created the world’s first successful automated commercial monitoring system, Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

In the mid-1990’s, Lert became interested in the supermarket industry. He came to view food retailing as a highly complex business operating at enormous scale, still using the basic self-service store model invented a century earlier. In other words, a fertile opportunity for technology innovation—especially in store operations and customer experience. He began to imagine a supermarket in which the center-store aisles would be replaced by a machine that would pick all customer orders for packaged goods, while leaving the picking of the fresh goods such as produce, meats, seafood, deli, etc., to the customers themselves (or store staff as proxies). Such a model, he realized, would revolutionize food retail by allowing customers to order their food electronically from digital catalogs and only go into the store if they wanted to pick their own fresh goods. 

However, when Lert studied available automation technologies, all of which had been developed for warehouse applications, he recognized that cranes and conveyors could never scale down to automate the center store of a supermarket. He began to imagine instead the use of small mobile robots as a new solution strategy, and he decided to make it his mission to create the robots to automate item-picking so that he could then create the world’s first automated supermarket, which he called “Novastore”.

As he learned more about retail logistics, Lert realized that case-picking in warehouses was a more pressing industry problem, and was also easier to solve technically, which lead him to invent an innovative case-picking solution using mobile robots. He found a strategic partner in Rick Cohen, who owned C&S Wholesale Grocers and was seeking to automate their large-scale case-picking operations. In 2007, Lert started CasePick Systems, LLC as Founder & CEO, with funding from Cohen, and brough Rob Sullivan on board to build and lead the development team that successfully brought this technology to life. In 2009, Cohen acquired full ownership of the company, which was later renamed Symbotic, and in May, 2022, Walmart announced their plan to deploy Symbotic’s technology into all 42 of its grocery distribution centers in the US. Today, Symbotic is publicly traded with a market cap of $14 billion.

After leaving Symbotic in 2011, Lert resumed his quest to automate item-picking and create the Novastore model. In 2013, he founded Alert Innovation, Inc., and soon began to collaborate with Bill Fosnight, a former colleague of Rob’s at Brooks Automation. In 2015, Lert and Fosnight co-invented a highly innovative robotic each-picking system they called Alphabot. Shortly thereafter, in early 2016, they met with a team from Walmart that was searching for a solution to automate e-grocery fulfillment inside supercenters. Their search was codenamed “Project Alpha”, and they immediately recognized Alphabot as the solution that Project Alpha was looking for, and another strategic partnership was born. In August 2016, with funding from Walmart as strategic partner, Alert Innovation launched operations with Lert as Founder/CEO and Fosnight as Co-Founder/EVP, and they assembled a world-class team of automation engineers that brought the Alphabot technology to life. In 2022, Walmart acquired Alert Innovation and subsequently rebranded the team as Walmart Advanced Systems and Robotics. The Alphabot technology is currently being deployed across selected Walmart supercenters in the US enabling each one to double as both a self-service store and an automated e-grocery fulfillment hub (also known as micro-fulfillment center, or “MFC”).

That acquisition marked the end of Lert’s 25-year quest to re-invent food retail, and he then entered a new phase of creative invention in other diverse application domains. In 2024, Lert decided to leverage his talents as an inventor, his knowledge and experience in business, his understanding of CEO leadership, and his new financial resources to create Alert Venture Foundry. He was fortunate to partner again with Rob Sullivan, and together they are building the world-class teams that will bring an array of new technologies and new companies to life.