Popchew 🍟

Over the last decade, some of the fastest growing brands have captured digital consumers without owning physical assets.

Here are some examples:

This week’s company is building the largest fast food chain without owning any real estate, employing any line cooks, or purchasing any inventory.

Digitally native: Popchew monetizes through an asset light model where they can scale globally without investing in real estate, food, or labor, serving customers solely through food delivery platforms.

Pop-culture: Popchew partners with iconic brands and celebrities to build its customer base, then engages them through gaming, content, and rewards.

Restaurants: Popchew adds to the revenue stream of established restaurants, providing recipes, a supply chain, and technology, but leaving the prep to their partners.

Industry: Food and Beverage, Food Delivery

Headquarters: New York City 🍎

Year founded: 2021

Employee count: 10

Investors: Long Journey Ventures, WndrCo, Flybridge, Unanimous Capital, Anti Fund (Jake Paul), Vinyl Capital, Magic Fund, Scott Banister, Ryan Moore, Rich Antoniello, Anthony Pompliano

Amount raised: $7M

Currently raising: Series A

Business model: 40% take rate per kitchen sales

Early traction: 2.3M revenue run rate ($6.8M GMV), 93 active kitchens, sold more than 320,000 meals, partnerships with Doritos, PepsiCo, and celebrities like Trippie Redd

Escalon’s essential business services streamline your processes and free your talent to focus on what you do best: Growing your business.

Here are a few of their services that might benefit your startup:

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✔️ Their financial operations solution offers a full suite of services including accounting, monthly reporting, FP&A, fractional CFO support, tax & valuations, and more.

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🛒 Market and consumer sentiment: Popchew is positioned to capitalize on the rapidly growing $26.1B US food delivery market expected to double in the next 5 years.

👩‍💻 Adding revenue to restaurants: Popchew's business model significantly benefits partner kitchens, offering the average restaurant an extra $92k a year.

⭐️ Playing into pop-culture: Popchew has incorporated drops, mini-games, content, prizes, collectibles, competition, and more to build trust, brand affinity, and create an emotional connection with customers. 

🙄 Failure of past models: Notably, Virtual Dining Concept’s Mr Beast Burgers, exploded to $100M in revenue and then shut down due to quality control issues and lawsuits.

😳 The health-conscious consumer: Popchew’s fast-food-centric menu might clash with the health-conscious tendencies of its Gen Z target audience.

📈 Buying into the brand: Popchew faces the challenge of swaying users to buy into its brand and initiatives over other established and well recognized brands.

Nick Sopchak, CEO: Previously on the founding teams of Super Order, Hoist, and Pilotworks.

Rushir Parikh, CSO: Experience in product management at Fetch, Shipt, and Bellhop

Superorder: Backed by Y Combinator, BBQ Capital, Slow Ventures, Foundation Capital, and others.

C3: Backed by Brookfield Asset Management, REEF, Triartisan Capital Advisors, Lurra Capital, and others.

Nextbite: Backed by Techstars, TenOneTen Ventures, Nosara Capital, Foundry Group, SoftBank Vision Fund

Virtual Dining Concepts: Backed by Spice Private Equity and others.

🗞 This week in venture: Here were the most active US investors in October and some of the deals they did.

💡 The innovation situation: This was a massive week for AI with Open AI’s DevDay and the introduction of what might be the smart-phone replacement.

👋 See you in two weeks: There won’t be a Bulletpitch feature in you inbox next week, but if you miss us you can always check out past companies we’ve featured.

The results are in: Smoov, an app for couples to split and manage expenses, had mixed feedback from subscribers.

Subscriber feedback: “While this is certainly useful for couples, it feels like more of a feature than an app.”