The “restaurant of the future” may elicit thoughts of a chrome diner with robot servers and an otherwise hefty amount of Tokyo futurist kitsch, but the fact is that the forthcoming sit-down dining experience may just end up looking a lot like ordering from a takeout app.

Presto is working with restaurants to update the 21st century dine-in experience, letting customers order and pay from their table with a tablet device while also providing hardware like wearables for servers so they can be alerted when they are needed by customers.

The company announced today that they’ve raised $30 million in growth funding from Recruit Holdings and Romulus Capital. I2BF Global Ventures, EG Capital and Brainchild Holdings also participated in the raise. 

Considering how much online shopping has shaped commerce and apps like Instacart and Uber Eats are changing how we get food delivered to our houses, it’s a bit peculiar that physical restaurants with hundreds of locations have been so slow to shift the customer experience toward a greater reliance on tech.

Presto has launched partnerships with a number of restaurant chains like Applebee’s, Red Lobster, Denny’s and Outback Steakhouse. These aren’t exactly mom-and pop locations, but Presto CEO Raj Suri says these large restaurant groups are always looking to shift their weight to improve efficiencies across the board with new tech in a way that most small businesses just aren’t.

“I would say most restaurant groups are looking at how they can become more of a tech company… and adopt technology that could help them become more efficient,” Suri tells TechCrunch. “The industry is moving in this direction in a pretty significant way and it won’t be long before you see our technology in every restaurant.”

Beyond the ordering hardware, Presto’s new AI platform is aiming to give restaurants a more robust look at the state of each individual business and insights that help managers make decisions about staffing or deciding which food items to stock. The platform leverages a variety of data inputs so that things like nearby sporting events or weather patterns can be integrated into suggestions about how many servers should be staffed on a given Tuesday.

Presto is looking to supercharge their platform with the funding and rapidly expand their footprint. The 11-year-old company is now supporting 5,000 restaurant locations, but Suri says that Presto will double that number in 2019.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Presto raises M to bring its AI platform and tabletop ordering hardware to restaurant chains

Party planning can be fun if you have the time for it and happen to know what you’re doing. For the rest of us, it can be a daunting, time-consuming endeavor, one that requires visits to numerous websites, in-store visits when those products invariably don’t arrive in time, then return visits to pick up those last items that you could have sworn you’d thrown in your shopping cart but did not.

Enter Coterie, a nine-month-old, New York-based startup that was incubated with the help of the investment firm Female Founders Fund and that is assembling party kits that it’s delivering to customers’ doorsteps, for everything from birthday parties to baby showers to friendversary get-togethers.

Just tell the site how many people you expect, whether it’s 10 or 50, then pick a kit. For example, the “lux” version of its “shine on” package — which could pretty much suit any occasion — comes with glittery plates, metallic flatware, votives, string lights, gold paper straws, dressed-up paper cups and napkins and confetti. Oh, also, gold paper fans as either wall or table decoration.

In the near future, customers of the site will also be able to handpick their products.

It’s less expensive to assemble your own party items, particularly if they are made of paper. That “lux” kit for 50 guests costs $329, with free shipping. These are also mostly items that can’t be reused.

Still, many of Coterie’s products can be recycled and, more to the point for Coterie, the sum of their parts can make a party sparkle in photos. Indeed, ease aside, a big motivator for Coterie customers seemingly will be how their parties look on social media, though venture capitalist Laura Chau disagrees with this assessment.

In fact, Chau, an investor at Canaan Partners who wrote a check to Coterie on behalf of her firm — Coterie has raised $2.75 million altogether, including from Female Founders Fund — says the company more or less pokes fun at social media. As she explains it, Coterie is building a modern brand that gives consumers a “frictionless, elevated and more beautiful experience. But the goal is not to feed on the fake perfection of Instagram but to blow up the idea that such perfection is real.”

Either way, party kits done the right way looks like a big business opportunity to Chau, who says she sees dozens of direct-to-consumer brands every month that might be interesting but don’t fit the venture model because the market is too small or too crowded. With Coterie, she says, it’s a “massive category with only one legacy player — Party City. And no one likes Party City.”

This last part is true, though there are also other, legacy players that no one really likes, including Oriental Trading Company.

Canaan and Female Founders Fund also appear to be betting that the tailwinds from Instagram and Pinterest will drive consumer demand for this kind of product. Just look up “festive planning” on Pinterest to see what we mean.

Coterie was founded by Sarah Raffa and Linden Ellis, two early employees of another e-commerce brand, Daily Harvest. According to an interview with CNN earlier this week, the friends were determined to start their own company, bouncing ideas off the partners at Female Founders Fund until collectively striking on Coterie.

The service launched on Monday.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Coterie, a young New York startup, promises to deliver charming party kits to your doorstep

Compass, the real estate tech platform that is now worth $4.4 billion, has made an acquisition to give its agents a boost when it comes to looking for good leads on properties to sell. It is acquiring Contactually, an AI-based CRM platform designed specifically for the industry, which includes features like linking up a list of homes sold by a brokerage with records of sales in the area and other property indexes to determine which properties might be good targets to tap for future listings.

Contactually had already been powering Compass’s own CRM service that it launched last year, so there is already a degree of integration between the two.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Crunchbase notes that Contactually had raised around $18 million from VCs that included Rally Ventures, Grotech and Point Nine Capital, and it was last valued at around $30 million in 2016, according to PitchBook. From what I understand, the startup had strong penetration in the market, so it’s likely that the price was a bit higher than this previous valuation.

The plan is to bring over all of Contactually’s team of 32 employees, led by Zvi Band, the co-founder and CEO, to integrate the company’s product into Compass’s platform completely. They will report to CTO Joseph Sirosh and head of product Eytan Seidman. It will also mean a bigger operation for Compass in Washington, DC, which is where Contactually had been based.

“The Contactually team has worked for the past 8 years to build a best-in-class CRM that aggregates relationships and automatically documents every touchpoint,” said Band in a statement “We are proud that our investment into machine learning has resulted in new features like Best Time to Email and other data-driven, follow-up recommendations which help agents be more effective in their day-to-day. After working extensively with the Compass team, it was apparent that joining forces would accelerate our missions of building the future of the industry.”

For the time being, customers who are already using the product — and a large number of real estate brokers and agents in the U.S. already were, at prices that ranged from $59/month to $399/month depending on the level of service — will continue their contracts as before.

I suspect that the longer-term plan, however, will be a little different: You have to wonder if agents who compete against Compass would be happy to use a service where their data is being processed by it, and for Compass itself. I would suspect that having this tech for itself would give it an edge over the others.

Compass, I understand from sources, is on track to make $2 billion in revenues in 2019 (its 2018 targets were $1 billion on $34 billion in property sales, and it had previously said it would be doubling that this year). Now in 100 cities, it’s come a long way from its founding in 2012 by Ori Allon and Robert Reffkin.

The bigger picture beyond real estate is that, as with many other analog industries, those who are tackling them with tech-first approaches are sweeping up not only existing business, but in many cases helping the whole market to expand. Contactually, as a tool that can help source potential properties for sale that owners hadn’t previously considered putting on the market, could end up serving that very end for Compass.

The focus on using tech to storm into a legacy industry is also coming at an interesting time. As we’ve pointed out before, the housing market is predicted to cool this year, and that will put the squeeze on agents who do not have strong networks of clients and the tools to maximise whatever opportunities there are out there to list and sell properties.

The likes of Opendoor — which appears to be raising money and inching closer to Compass in terms of valuation — is also trying out a different model, which essentially involves becoming a middle part in the chain, buying properties from sellers and selling them on to buyers, to speed up the process and cut out some of the expenses for the end users. That approach underscores the fact that, while the infusion of technology is an inevitable trend, there will be multiple ways of applying that.

This appears to be Compass’s first full acquisition of a tech startup, although it has made partial acqui-hires in the past.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Compass acquires Contactually, a CRM provider to the real estate industry

Against a backdrop of public backlash and looming federal regulations, the world’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturer has released video of the original thesis presentation that launched Juul, with the hopes of making the case that its purpose is to do no harm — or at least less harm.

The founders of Juul have told their story before — the two met and became friends over smoke breaks at Stanford University, and eventually decided to design an alternative product to cigarettes. Juul today released a video of that thesis, presented by James Monsees (MFA in Product Design) and Adam Bowen (MSME in Product Design).

Bowen and Monsees say they started with the principle of harm reduction, aiming to keep the “good” and eliminate the “bad” from cigarettes. The people they spoke to said they were attracted to the ritual of smoking, and the satisfaction of basic human cravings like an oral fixation. However, smokers were tired of smelling like a cigarette and complained that, even if they weren’t being judged, they felt judged. Of course, hanging over all of this like a storm cloud is the fact that smoking is inherently bad for your health.

Monsees says in his presentation:

“Is it even possible to make a safe cigarette? What if smoking were safe? And even better, what if smoking wasn’t offensive to others?”

Back in 2004, when the presentation was given, Monsees and Bowen identified one of the strongest pillars of Juul’s value proposition as a cigarette replacement.

“It’s not the nicotine that’s really hurting you,” said Monsees. “It’s burning tobacco, the combustion and burning plant material.”

Professor at NYU’s College of Global Public Health David Abrams, who has advised Juul but not been compensated by them, told The New Yorker that the stigma of cigarettes has followed e-cigarettes.

“Cigarettes were a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he said. “Now, with vaping, we have a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and we cannot get the wolf out of our minds.”

Part of the reason we can’t get the wolf out of our minds is the fact that minors have taken up e-cigarettes, and Juul in particular, in staggering numbers. For young people, nicotine and nicotine addiction have a far more egregious affect on health than they would for an adult former smoker. To teenagers, nicotine is indeed a wolf.

And it’s this issue that poses the greatest existential threat to Juul Labs. The FDA has asked for Juul and other e-cig companies to create and enforce new policies that will stymie use of these products by minors, but thus far Commissioner Gottlieb doesn’t seem too impressed.

In the presentation from 2004, Bowen presents a slide that shows the future company’s predicted demographic. On a scale from social smokers to pack-a-day smokers, Monsees and Bowen estimated that it would pick up users across the spectrum, with the majority of adoption coming from social/light smokers.

Ten years later, however, when the thesis project had evolved into Ploom which then evolved into the Juul we know today, the company made a marketing decision that surely still haunts them. The early marketing campaign for the device showed young, hip models using the device. To this day, the campaign is cited by critics of the company for starting the youth craze over the device, which the FDA calls an epidemic.

Juul Labs has taken action to reverse this trend, including a $30 million investment in youth prevention, removal of non-tobacco-flavored nicotine pods from retail stores, deleting its social media, enforcing stricter age verification for online sales, an offensive legal push against counterfeiters and copycats and a new $10 million ad campaign focused on attracting smokers to “make the switch” to Juul.

“It [underage use] is an issue we desperately want to resolve,” chief product officer and co-founder James Monsees said in August. “It doesn’t do us any favors. Any underage consumers using this product are absolutely a negative for our business. We don’t want them. We will never market to them. We never have. And they are stealing life years from adult cigarette consumers at this moment, and that’s a shame.”

Whether Juul’s efforts will be enough to prevent further regulation remains to be seen.

But from an entrepreneurial perspective, it’s interesting to see the earliest seed of a company that has now become a behemoth in its respective industry. In fact, Juul has grown to the point where Altria, makers of Marlboro cigarettes, have invested $12.8 billion in the company.

It’s also fascinating to watch the rhetoric around Juul evolve based on the state of regulation. In early conversations with Juul, back when it was called Ploom, the team was highly sensitive to the concept that the device was a smoking cessation product, lest it be regulated as such. With regulation now inevitable, cessation has become the top focus of the company.

Studies show that 40 to 55 percent of adult smokers who used Juul switch fully from combustible cigarettes within 90 days.

Alongside the thesis video, Juul also released a video of present-day Monsees and Bowen recalling the product design process for Juul.

“We started this project with the firm belief that innovation could address all the problems associated with smoking,” said Bowen in the video. “I would tell people, anyone who would listen, ’50 years from now no one will smoke cigarettes, they’re going to look back and think Oh my God, I can’t believe people used to do that.’ And now I think that’s actually going to happen much faster. In large part because of the progress that we’ve made.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | This is the Stanford thesis presentation that launched Juul