Tapingo Orders Up $22 Million In Series C Funding To Grow Beyond The College Market

CodeFights Scores $2.4 Million To Turn Coding Practice Into A GameThere are at least 12 on-demand food startups within the Bay Area – two of them focus solely on delivering cookies. And there are plenty more beyond the borders of San Francisco. With Postmates, Caviar and Grubhub doing this, let’s just say getting food delivered whenever you want is a crowded space. Mobile food orders startup Tapingo focuses on a more specific vertical to help it stand out here – college students.
But college students graduate and move off-campus and Tapingo is left with recruiting a whole new crop of freshmen to the app. The startup’s solution is to now move into surrounding areas near campus in order to retain the college student user base.
Tapingo has announced a Series C raise of $22 million led by Qualcomm today to help it do just that. DCM Ventures, Kinzon Capital, and existing investors Khosla Ventures and Carmel Ventures also participated in the round, bringing the funding total to $36 million now.
Currently, Tapingo partners with college campuses to coordinate pick-up hubs where students can pick up their orders. A student can make an order on the app ahead of time at a campus cafe and then pick it up without having to wait in line. Other students waiting in line see the student simply pick up their order and then download the app.
I could be the last one to know about this, but tapingo is now delivering McDonald's. This could be a game changer for weekend mornings 💀
— Marie Wall (@MarieWall) April 1, 2015
You can see how the idea catches on with the college students. Tapingo currently processes more than 25,000 transactions per day, with the average user transacting more than four times per week, according to the company.
This kind of growth and participation helped the startup expand from 24 to 85 campuses in Canada and the U.S. last year. It plans to expand to a total of 100 200 by the end of this year.
The possibility of going off campus and into larger institutions or surrounding areas could benefit both Tapingo and brick-and-mortar stores. Who really likes to wait in the long lines at Starbucks? No one, that’s who. This could mean eliminating lines in several other areas as well (amusement parks? the DMV?). The plan is just surrounding areas of campus for now.
Tapingo has already started testing a delivery service with its users and plans to expand beyond just food. This could be things like on-demand laundry or other delivery as well. It already allows students to do other, non-food related orders such as reserving a campus parking space.
Related ArticlesTapingo Adds Former Google And Yahoo Exec Jeff Hardy As Chief Revenue OfficerKhosla Leads A $10.5M Round For Tapingo To Bring Mobile Food Ordering To A Campus Near You
Expansion into other verticals has always been part of the plan, according to Almog. He said college students were just the proving ground for what Tapingo was capable of. “What we didn’t anticipate was how quickly universities and students would adopt this new behavior. This validated our decision to bring the technology to analogous ecosystems,” Almog said.
Tapingo will use the new round of funding to rapidly hire a bunch of new employees to help with the expansion off campus as well as invest in product development, operations, and marketing.

By: Unknown On 02:39

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Amazon’s New Dash Button Hardware Offers Instant Orders For Staple Products

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Amazon has new hardware called the Dash Button that allows one-press ordering of products you’re likely to want to replace on a regular basis. The Dash Button comes in a number of different branded versions based on what it’s coded to order, and includes an adhesive backing and hook holster to let you stick it where it’s most convenient.
The Dash Button is a natural extension of Amazon’s one-click ordering feature on the web, but turned into a hardware gadget that makes ordering laundry detergent, for instance, as easy as actually starting the wash cycle. Amazon clearly hopes that if you have a physical one-button device near the place where you actually consume these consumables, you’re more likely to have the presence of mind to order them via its service before you run out, when a trip to the corner store might prove more convenient even than home delivery.
You setup Amazon’s Dash Button using the Amazon mobile app, and then connecting to your Wi-Fi network to assign the product you want the Dash Button to order with a single press (limited by brands pictured on the hardware at launch, apparently). Once it’s configured, the button will automatically trigger an order to your default address using your default Amazon payment order, and you can cancel it via your phone should you have second thoughts. Amazon won’t trigger another order made via subsequent button presses until the first one is delivered, the company notes, unless you override that manually.
At launch, the eligible products for the Dash Button include things like toilet paper, cleaning products, juice, personal grooming products, dog food and much more.
The Dash Button is tied to Amazon’s Dash Replenishment service, which will offer direct integration for the same kind of service into devices themselves. Imagine, for instance, a coffee maker that has a button to automatically re-order coffee beans or filters, or a washing machine with a built-in button to order detergent. Amazon has already partnered with a number of companies to make this happen, and will ship the first-such devices this fall. Some products will even auto-detect when they need replacement supplies and order instantly if a consumer enables that feature.

For now, the Dash Button is the easiest way for consumers to get on board, but you’ll have to be a Prime Member and request an invite to get on board. The hardware itself is free, however, as Amazon clearly wants to make the purchasing process as easy as possible in the interest of selling more consumables down the road.

By: Unknown On 16:06

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