Y Combinator-backed flower delivery startup Bloomthat gathered $2 million in its seed financing round, TechCrunch reported. The new investors for the San Francisco-based company that delivers blooms in the San Francisco Bay Area in 90 minutes or less include SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary's A-Grade Investments, Joe Montana, Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanion and Y Combinator Partner Garry Tan, Ron Rofe, Oliver Jung and Baron Davis.
Bloomthat's offerings include bouquets of tulips, anemones, roses and others and a couple of succulents. For Valentine's Day, the startup offers two bouquets as well. The bouquets, which are priced anywhere from $35 to $65, are hand-delivered in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the report said.
Co-Founder Matthew Schwab told TechCrunch, "We're trying to change the way people think about flowers - that they're not obligatory." Bloomthat seeks to make delivering flowers seamless so that customers will not only view them as only for special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries. Schwab said their sales are doubling every other month. Bloomthat has also just rolled out their iOS app, the report said.
Ordering is simple as all a customer needs to do is choose a bouquet and input the destination address and payment information. A florist will then assemble your bouquet and a messenger will bring it to the address by bike, except in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park and Sunnyvale where Bloomthat uses cars for delivery. They are planning to bring the service to metropolitan areas as well, the report said.
The company uses burlap sacks or corrugated tins to deliver their flowers. They have also come up with an aesthetic that's a bit offbeat and not very formal. Schwab said, "We believe very strongly in the curation we put into our products. We want simplicity, and we don't want people choosing from 30 or 40 bouquets."
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