Cloosiv raises $1M to bring mobile ordering to every coffee shop
A few months back we took a look at Cloosiv, a company aiming to provide smaller coffee shops a mobile ordering solution that can compete with those of the mega coffee chains.
Today the Cloosiv team is announcing that they've raised a $1M seed round.
Most coffee shops want to be able to offer mobile ordering - but apps are tough to build and maintain, and users don't want to install an app for a coffee shop they might only visit once or twice.
Instead, Cloosiv's approach is to build one big network of coffee shops all under the same app roof. Open up Cloosiv, and up pops a list of nearby, Cloosiv-enabled shops. Tap into any of the shops, and you'll get a mobile ordering experience not unlike what you'll find at the huge name competitors - with things like order history, item customization, and tipping all incorporated. Cloosiv charges merchants a percentage off each order, with the percentage decreasing as order volume goes up.
Cloosiv founder Tim Griffin tells me that investors in the round include Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, Roger Dickey (Founder and former CEO of Gigster), Avichal Garg (former Facebook Director of Product Management), Ken Deeter, Brad Powers (CTO of Passport), and John Kim (co-founder of the chat API company SendBird).
Cloosiv currently has around 315 locations using the platform, and they're expecting to pass 500 by the end of this year.
With mobile ordering making up at least 13% of Starbucks' transactions in the US last year, this space is heating up. A competing platform out of Seattle, Joe Coffee, announced just a few months back that it had raised $750k with plans to expand its network to other major cities.
While Cloosiv merchants currently receive orders through the standalone Cloosiv app, the next step for the company is integrating orders into the point-of-sales apps many merchants are already using - like Clover, Micros, and Square. Griffin tells me a partnership with Square is already in the works, with integration into the Square point-of-sales app "close."
