2022 Benefit for Stuyvesant - The Young Pegleg Award
Lindon Gao ’09 is the Founder and CEO of Caper AI, the world’s first smart grocery cart powered by artificial intelligence. Caper Cart uses AI-powered cameras and weight sensors to recognize items as they are placed into the cart without having to scan or weigh them. Customers can pay with the cart and completely bypass the checkout lines. On October 29, 2021, Instacart announced that it was acquiring Caper for $350 million.
Caper might be Lindon’s most successful company to date but it is definitely not his first. Lindon already started his first company trading gaming collectables by the time he entered Stuyvesant. By age 19, he started his second company, LPG Crafts, which he turned into a multi-million dollar business.
After graduating from Stuyvesant, Lindon studied at NYU Stern for his undergraduate business degree. Post-college, he worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker for more than two years but eventually realized that he preferred entrepreneurship to finance.
In 2016, Lindon and his co-founders launched QueueHop, an anti-theft apparel tag that would unlock when you pay with an app. QueueHop was accepted by Y Combinator and even raised $150K in seed capital. Their work on QueueHop eventually led them to develop Caper. In 2020, Lindon and his Caper co-founders were all named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list for their transformative product in the Retail & Ecommerce industry.