After co-founding and leading Punchh through its $500+ million acquisition, I kept coming back in my mind to an overlooked segment of the retail market. Fuel and convenience retail was an $837+ billion industry serving millions of customers daily.

Convenience stores are the cornerstone of many neighborhoods, roadways and small communities across America. They provide quick access to food, fuel and everyday essentials. 46% of people in the US visit a convenience store weekly, with 32% visiting daily. Convenience stores provide much needed jobs, especially in rural communities. They are part of the heartbeat of America.

Yet, these stores were stuck with point-of-sale systems that hadn’t fundamentally evolved in decades. The frustration wasn’t just technological. It was human. Store operators wanted to create loyalty programs that actually worked. Marketing teams needed to launch campaigns without months of IT delays. Associates deserved tools that made their jobs easier, not harder. Customers expected the same seamless experience they get everywhere else.

Legacy POS vendors had these retailers trapped in expensive, inflexible systems that charged astronomical fees for basic improvements and took months to implement simple changes. Meanwhile, customer expectations were evolving at the speed of AI.

Bridging the Online-Offline Experience Gap

The disparity between online and in-person experiences has always frustrated me. Online, every page is an opportunity for personalization—recommendations based on browsing history, targeted offers, dynamic content that adapts to each visitor. But in physical retail, the richest interaction happens at the very end, during checkout, when it’s too late to influence the journey.

I founded Tote to flip this paradigm. We let stores create personalized experiences from the very first touchpoint—at the pump for fuel and convenience—all the way through checkout. When a customer taps their phone at the pump, we can instantly recognize them and surface relevant offers before they even enter the store. Marketers finally get what they’ve had online for years: the ability to influence customer behavior throughout the entire journey, not just at the register.

But it’s not just about customers and marketers. IT professionals deserve infrastructure they can actually manage easily, not the complex, vendor-locked systems that require an army of support just to make basic changes. Our platform gives them unified control over their entire technology stack, from fuel dispensers to POS terminals, without the operational headaches.

Fuel and convenience retail has been passed over for too long. But Tote is here to put the convenience of AI into today’s convenience stores. Look for more product details over the coming weeks.