• BentoBox

  Participated · Series A · Jul 2017

  BentoBox builds mobile-friendly websites and commerce tools for restaurants, giving restaurateurs a controlled online presence. The platform can push website content to third-party platforms like Google and Facebook. BentoBox charges a subscription fee rather than taking transaction cuts and has added revenue-driving features such as gift-card sales, private-event booking, catering orders and on-demand online ordering. The company says it works with more than 4,000 restaurants across all 50 states and in 16 countries, including Union Square Hospitality Group, Eleven Madison Park and José Andrés’ Think Food Group. Founder and CEO Krystle Mobayeni says the product focuses on helping restaurants drive revenue through ordering and booking while retaining ownership of guest relationships. With the new funding the company plans to work with larger restaurant chains and build additional features like point-of-sale and reservation systems. BentoBox provides a code-free CMS and highly customizable website templates tailored for restauranteurs, enabling quick creation of full-featured, design-forward sites. Its platform includes plug-and-play features for menus, reservation integration (including OpenTable), catering transactions, gift cards, ticket sales, deposits, and contracts, and is mobile-friendly and SEO-optimized. BentoBox emphasizes letting restaurant owners update sites without hiring developers while preserving the restaurant’s design aesthetic online. The company has processed over $1 million in transactions and serves more than 1,200 restaurant clients worldwide. Pricing varies roughly between $100 and $500 per month and is being continually tweaked as new features are added, according to founder and CEO Krystle Mobayeni. New funding will support marketing, expansion of the sales team, and development of a new marketing tool for clients. BentoBox provides restaurants with fast, affordable, and customizable websites built from industry-specific templates. Restaurants enter information on BentoBox and the company delivers a robust, restaurant-tailored site that owners can update themselves. The platform includes a developer back-end so external developers can build custom sites while preserving BentoBox’s easy updating tools. Developers can add transactional features such as gift cards and CRM-based tools for booking private parties, taking reservations, and collecting feedback. BentoBox works with clients like Union Square Hospitality Group, The Meatball Shop, and The Breslin and reports a 100 percent client retention rate. The company recently raised a $1.2 million seed round from Female Founders Fund and others.

• Spoiler Alert

  Participated · Seed · Nov 2016

  Spoiler Alert provides a B2B liquidation platform that enables food and beverage brands to digitize and manage excess, short-dated, and obsolete inventory across private networks of discount retailers and nonprofit channels. The software focuses on maximizing value recovery, strengthening customer relationships, and improving supply chain effectiveness for perishable consumer packaged goods. Its customers include major global CPG firms such as Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, Campbell Soup Company, and Danone North America. Over the past 12 months the company has seen adoption-driven growth, reporting over 400% growth in gross transaction value and zero customer churn. Spoiler Alert also enables opportunistic purchasing for discount retailers and emerging DTC grocers like Ollie's Bargain Barn and Misfits Market. The company plans to use new funding to expand its team, invest in platform enhancements to move more inventory through diversified channels, and support go-to-market efforts for product category diversification. Spoiler Alert offers a cloud-based software and services platform that enables item-level tracking, reporting of food recovery and waste diversion, and facilitation of donations, discounted sales, and organics recycling. The company integrates with enterprise resource planning and warehouse management systems to give organizations visibility into inventory indicators and reduce waste before products become landfill-bound. Customers include major food distributor Sysco and meal-kit company HelloFresh, with a reported trial that cut HelloFresh's supply-chain food waste by 65%. Spoiler Alert was born out of MIT in 2015 and is based in Boston. The team has launched an accelerator program, FoodTrack, focused on technologies that combat food waste. Management says newly raised proceeds will be used to build out product and engineering teams, expand customer success and business development, and strengthen the management team ahead of a planned Series A in 2019. Founded in 2015 and based in Boston, Spoiler Alert provides cloud-based enterprise software that connects food producers, logistics companies, food banks and pantries to reduce food waste. The platform helps producers track inventory they would otherwise discard, attain tax credits for donations, and sell surplus or "ugly" produce and near-spoilage goods to other businesses at discounted rates. Spoiler Alert positions itself as a secondary wholesale marketplace for food, enabling farms to sell imperfect produce to juice or soup makers and similar buyers. The company has worked with large food producers and farms, including a recent partnership with Sysco Corporation (Sysco reports roughly $50 billion in annual revenue). Spoiler Alert does not operate its own shipping but partners with for-profit and nonprofit organizations that provide temperature-controlled transport. The company plans to use funding to expand its services to food producers and nonprofits across every major U.S. metro area and to broaden support for diverting organic waste to uses like livestock feed or clean energy.

No current team members are available.