Small coffee shops that relied on foot traffic reeled as the global pandemic kept people indoors. At this point, many coffee shop owners turned to technology to accept online orders and payments.
Startups have also been eager to help these companies stay safely in business – and venture capital has followed suit. For example, Joe Coffee raised some money to help coffee shops accept mobile orders, and Odeko and Cloosiv partnered to combine their inventory and mobile ordering apps. As a combined company, Odeko subsequently raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding.
When Jack Pawlik and Avery Durrant founded New York-based coffee shop software company Dripos in 2019, they didn’t know they would soon be joining this group. The couple’s original idea was to help local coffee shops develop mobile ordering apps, similar to Starbucks’ offering.
“The more we interacted with operators and store owners, the more we realized it was just a much larger issue,” Pawlik told TechCrunch exclusively. “We almost compounded this problem by being such a platform.”
Dripos co-founders and co-CEOs Avery Durrant and Jack Pawlik. Photo credit: will drip
Through conversations with store owners, Pawlik and Durrant learned that many were using a simple point-of-sale system like Square. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but it wasn’t “exactly designed for their workflow,” Pawlik said. Many stores then deployed five to ten additional pieces of software to close the gaps.
Pawlik and Durrant decided to create a tool that would replace Square, Toast, and these eight other pieces of software with one comprehensive tool.
Dripos brings together point-of-sale; mobile payments; employee management and payroll; loyalty and marketing automation; and administrative functions such as accounting and banking.
Manny Caral, owner and operator of Revolucion Coffee + Juice, which has five locations in Texas, recently converted its locations to Dripos and said in a statement that Revolucion is one of those companies that uses five different products, including Toast and Square.
“We can achieve this and much more through Dripos,” said Caral. “The product has allowed us to streamline our daily operations and free up time to focus more on our customer experience.”
Dripos’ approach has also found favor with other customers. Last year was the first full year the company used the new tool. It is now in coffee shops in 46 states. The number of locations relying on Dripos has increased by 400%, and the company processes hundreds of millions in annual payments.
Now the company wants to invest in areas such as technology development and go-to-market, so Pawlik and Durrant secured $11 million in Series A funding. Early-stage venture capital firm Base10 Partners, known for investments in Plaid, Instacart and Figma, led the round and was backed by a group of angel investors including Y Combinator CEO Michael Siebel, Punchh founder Shyam Rao and Bench founder Ian Crosby. In total, the company raised $17.3 million.
As part of the investment, Base10 director Caroline Broder, who led Series A, joins the Dripos board.
“We are completely confident in this business model,” Broder told TechCrunch. “From the very beginning of our relationship, it was very clear that Jack and Avery had a vision of building a complete suite. They’ve developed a lot of products to be able to replace things like software early in the company’s life cycle. They understand what these business owners want and need and what they aren’t getting. Then they built something made specifically for them. This empathy towards customers is a rare quality.”