Peach Closes $8M Series A Round
2015-08-18
SEATTLE, WA, Peach today announced $8 million in Series A financing.
The round was led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Vulcan Capital, to expand the popular Peach lunch delivery service to major cities, including Boston and DC, by the end of the year. The company curates the best lunches in town -- from eight-table ethnic oases to well-known local chef-led restaurants -- for office workers throughout a metro area. Peach members receive a daily text with the dish of the day for their office, and simply reply 'yes' to place their order, which is delivered during the lunch hour. Restaurants that work with Peach have seen their lunch revenue grow significantly within months of launching on the Peach platform. The company has delivered more than 400,000 meals since opening their doors in June of 2014.
Peach has recently added catering, and now offers Lite and Vegetarian options for every lunch. The company currently operates in Seattle and San Diego, where it oversees the delivery of thousands of lunches, on time, every day, to hungry office workers. Peach uses algorithms to predict each restaurant's order volume a week in advance, optimizes delivery routes, and even helps drivers find the best places to park for quick and easy office delivery. Peach members appreciate its selection and prices -- the best dishes from the best restaurants in town, delivered every day, for $10-12.
While Peach uncovers unknown gems, it also taps into restaurants that already have fanatical followings such as Paseo Caribbean Food in Seattle. 'Even though we have lines out the door every day,' says Jason Flatebo, general manager of Paseo, 'our work with Peach brings in thousands in extra revenue each week, and has expanded our footprint significantly beyond our neighborhood locals and die hard lunch regulars. Working with Peach has been awesome and we see great things for them in the future.'
'Office workers want more interesting lunch options at a reasonable price delivered to their desk. Restaurants have excess production capacity before the lunch hour that they can put to profitable work,' said Nishant Singh, founder and CEO, Peach. 'These are the simple premises on which we started the company, and represent the hole in the market we are filling. With equal doses of technology and operational execution, we have built a platform and marketplace that fulfills a need for our customers on both sides of the equation every day. We have been overwhelmed and gratified by the response to Peach, and we look forward to working with the Madrona team to help us navigate as we expand our service over the coming years.'
The idea for Peach started while Nishant Singh and his co-founders worked as software engineers at Amazon.com. Always in search of a good meal but without time to prepare them, Nishant sought out interesting and different dinner delivery choices and soon had dozens of co-workers and people in his apartment building adding onto his order. Because they were ordering together, delivery costs were low. Seeing the response from restaurants who appreciated the bulk orders, Nishant and his co-founders figured a technology platform could solve this at a broad level for lunch and started Peach. All it takes is a couple of hungry software developers to find a way to make a meal both easier and more interesting.
'Nishant and his team have built a two-sided marketplace that works incredibly well for both restaurants and eaters. While there is no shortage of companies in this category, Peach is the first to design a service that delights both constituencies equally,' said Scott Jacobson, Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group. 'While technology does not immediately come to mind when you think of food production and delivery, there is a lot of software and data mining that goes into delivering the simple, friction-free service Peach has built. We look forward to partnering with Nishant and his team to expand to new markets and bring Peach to restaurants and hungry office workers across the country.' In conjunction with the financing, Jacobson has joined Peach's board of directors.
About Peach
Peach delivers thousands of unique and excellent lunches to eaters every day for a reasonable price and with extreme convenience. The company is located in Seattle, WA. For more information visit www.peachd.com
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