Bottomless raises $4.5M as Seattle startup grows team and business around smart coffee platform

Bottomless, the small Seattle startup with big e-commerce dreams, has raised $4.5 million in a new Series A funding round to help with the continued growth of its business, built around a smart scale and coffee subscription platform.

Created by husband-and-wife team Michael Mayer and Liana Herrera four years ago, Bottomless combines its WiFi-enabled, rechargeable coffee scale and machine learning to make sure you never run out of fresh coffee beans, which are shipped directly to the customer. Working with handpicked roasters from across the country, Bottomless learns the user’s taste preferences and makes recommendations over time.

Bottomless passed a $2 million revenue run rate this year and is benefitting from increased e-commerce penetration and “phenomenal retention.”

“The more people try e-commerce subscriptions, the more they experience getting shipments too often or not often enough,” Herrera said. “Shopify’s growth has helped us a lot, too. They’ve brought pretty much every roaster online, so now there is an amazing wealth of coffee being sold on the internet.

She also credited consumer social, where 75% of Bottomless’ growth last month was direct, organic or referral thanks to people talking more online to each other about what they buy.

Amazon’s release of the WiFi-enabled Dash Smart Shelf last October was viewed as “huge validation” for what Herrera and Mayer have built.

“The market size of repeat purchases for consumers is so large that there is no risk of saturation before Bottomless can reach a very large scale,” Herrera said at the time.

Bottomless currently employs eight people, with three in Seattle and five distributed around the globe. Plans are to at least double that count with in-person and remote hires for roles such as VP of growth, VP of product operation, content creator, full stack developer, lead designer and data scientist.

Bottomless has raised $6.55 million to date. Investors this round included Positive Sum, Craft Ventures, Pioneer Fund, FJ Labs, Turner Novak and Dalton Caldwell.

“We aim to build the world’s first and best sensor enabled e-commerce marketplace,” Herrera said. “Our technology allows people to get high quality products shipped directly to them from producers to any zip code in the country. We aim to allow people to level up any household good easily.”