Wake up and smell the funding. Pact Coffee, the UK coffee subscription service that delivers freshly roasted beans to your door, has closed a £2 million Series A round led by MMC Ventures.
Previous investor Connect Ventures has also participated, as well as Songkick founder Ian Hogarth, Robin Klein of Index Ventures, and Naked Wines founder Rowan Gormley. The double million shot of funding adds to the £500,000 Pact Coffee raised back in June 2013.
Founded by Stephen Rapoport, who previously built and sold the apartment-sharing site Crashpadder to Airbnb, Pact Coffee can be thought of as a sort of ‘Zappos of coffee‘ by attempting to make specialty coffee accessible to the mass market. Customers subscribe to the service — a classic e-commerce subscription play — and get freshly roasted coffee from around the world via next day delivery.
Competitors include other subscription coffee players such as HasBean and Kopi.
Stephen Rapoport, founder of Pact Coffee, says the new investment will be used to accelerate growth, as well as growing the startup’s team from 30 to 50 in the UK. He also notes that customer service (and, presumably, logistics rather than pure tech) will be key to success in the coffee subscription market.
“This model is not as simple as it looks from the outside; the frictionless customer experience has taken 18 months’ hard work and we are still just 5% of the way there,” he says.
Investors obviously like what they see so far, evidenced by today’s Series A round. But, then again, coffee isn’t called black gold for nothing.
