DripOS raises $11M in Series A to transform Square, Toast and 8 other software pieces

When the global pandemic locked people in their homes, small coffee shops that depended on foot traffic closed. 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 safely stay in business – and venture capital followed suit. For example, Joe Coffee raised some funding to help coffee shops take mobile orders, and Odeco and Closive merged to combine their inventory and mobile-ordering apps. As a combined entity, Odeco subsequently raised millions of dollars in venture-backed funding.

When Jack Pavlik and Avery Durant founded New York-based coffee shop software company Drippos in 2019, they had no idea they’d soon be joining the pack. The pair’s initial idea was to help local coffee shops create a mobile ordering app similar to what Starbucks offers.

“The more we talked with operators and shop owners, the more we realized there was a much bigger problem going on,” Pavlik told TechCrunch exclusively. “We were almost exacerbating that problem by being that kind of platform.”

Avery Durant and Jack Pavlik, co-founders and co-CEOs of Drypos. Image Credit: will drip

Through conversations with store owners, Pavlik and Durant learned that many were using a simple point-of-sale system like Square. This wasn’t necessarily bad, but “absolutely wasn’t for their workflow,” Pavlik said. Many shops employed five to 10 other pieces of software to fill the gap.

Pavlik and Durant decided to try and build a tool that would replace Square, Toast, and eight other pieces of software with one comprehensive tool.

Dripos brings together point-of-sale; mobile payment; employee management and payroll; Loyalty and marketing automation; and administrative functions such as accounting and banking.

Manny Carroll, owner and operator of Revolution Coffee + Juice, which has five locations in Texas, recently switched his location to Drippos and said in a statement that Revolution was one of the companies that used five different things, including toast and squares. Was getting it done.

“Through Dripos we are able to achieve this and more,” Carroll said. “The product has allowed us to streamline our daily operations and given us time to focus more on our customer experience.”

Dripose’s approach has appealed to other customers, too. Last year was the company’s first full year with the new tool; It now has a presence 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 payments annually.

Now the company wants to invest in areas like technology development and go-to-market, so Pavlik and Durant have 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 a group of angel investors that included Y Combinator managing partner Michael Seibel, Punch Shyam Rao, founder of Bench, and Ian Crosby, founder of Bench. In total the company has raised $17.3 million.

As part of the investment, Base10 principal Caroline Broder, who led the Series A, joined the Drippos board.

“We have complete confidence in this business model,” Broder told TechCrunch. “At the beginning of our relationship, it was very clear that Jack and Avery had a vision of creating a complete suite. They built a lot of products to be able to bring in and change things like software early in the company’s lifecycle. They understand what these business owners want and need and what they are not getting. Then they created something that was made especially for them. “Customer empathy is a rare quality.”