Small coffee shops that relied on foot traffic were thrown for a loop when the global pandemic kept people in their homes. That’s when many coffee shop owners turned to technology to help them take online orders and payments.
Startups were also eager to help these businesses stay safely in business — and venture capital followed. For example, Joe Coffee raised some funding to help coffee shops take mobile orders, and Odeko and Cloosiv merged to combine their inventory and mobile-ordering apps. As a combined entity, Odeko subsequently raised tens of millions of dollars in venture-backed 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 pair’s initial idea was to help local coffee shops build mobile ordering apps, similar to what Starbucks offers.
“The more we interacted with operators and shop owners, the more we realized that there was just a much bigger problem going on,” Pawlik told TechCrunch exclusively. “We were almost adding to that problem by being that kind of platform.”
Dripos co-founders and co-CEOs Avery Durrant and Jack Pawlik. Image Credits: Dripos
Through conversations with shop owners, Pawlik and Durrant learned that many were using a simple point-of-sale system, like Square. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, but not “meant exactly for their workflow,” Pawlik said. Many shops then employed five to 10 other pieces of software to fill in the gaps.
Pawlik and Durrant decided to pivot and build a tool that would replace Square, Toast and those 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 like accounting and banking.
Manny Caral, owner and operator of Revolucion Coffee + Juice with five locations in Texas, recently switched his locations to Dripos and said in a statement that Revolucion was one of those companies using five different things, including Toast and Square.
“We are able to achieve this and even much more through Dripos,” Caral said. “The product has allowed us to streamline our day-to-day operations and give us time back to focus more on our customer experience.”
Dripos’ approach has caught on with other customers as well. Last year was the company’s first full year with the new tool; it now has a presence in coffee shops across 46 states. The number of locations relying on Dripos increased 400%, and the company processes hundreds of millions in annual payments.
Now the company wants to invest in areas like 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 joined by Cota Capital and a group of angel investors, including Y Combinator managing partner Michael Seibel, Punchh founder Shyam Rao and Bench founder Ian Crosby. In total, the company has raised $17.3 million.
As part of the investment, Base10 principal Caroline Broder, who led the Series A, joins the Dripos board.
“We have full conviction in this business model,” Broder told TechCrunch. “In the very beginning of our relationship, it was very clear that Jack and Avery had this vision of building a full suite. They built a ton of products to be able to come in and replace things like software early in the company’s lifecycle. They understand what these business owners want and need and what they’re not getting. Then they built something that’s very specifically made for them. That customer empathy is a rare quality.”