With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, The Bouqs Company has raised another $24 million for its online flower delivery service.
The Series C, led by new Silicon Valley investor Partech Ventures, brings the 4-year-old Venice, California-based startup’s total funding to $43 million.
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The Bouqs aims to disrupt the $50 billion global floral industry by cutting out the middleman, delivering fresh-cut flowers from eco-friendly, sustainable farms around the world — including the U.S., Canada, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Africa — directly to doorsteps in the U.S. The company’s Valentine’s Day bouquets start at $40.
The new round “really sets us up for the ability to do everything that we’ve wanted to do,” The Bouqs founder and CEO John Tabis told me last week. “We’ll always be careful with capital, but we’ve been a little bit more reserved and we haven’t necessarily gone out and done everything we wanted to do. By the end of this year, consumers and you guys will see and feel the full potential of what we’ve been aiming to do, and we’re really excited about the opportunity to go build all that.”
The company will use the money to continue building the technology that powers its direct-to-consumer supply chain and grow the team. Over the past year, CTO Carlos Moreno has joined The Bouqs from eco-friendly fashion brand Reformation, and CMO Jarred Goldberg came aboard from fashion retailer Revolve.
Tabis said the company aims to grow from 45 employees to 75 “as soon as we possibly can” and thus will need to find new headquarters in Venice as well.
The Bouqs’ new partner Partech, which also has offices in Paris and Berlin, brings significant experience in building retail leaders such as GSI Commerce, Cdiscount.com and Made.com, among others.
The Series C comes on the heels of a successful 2016 during which The Bouqs, whose average annual growth rate is 200 percent, experienced multiple days with $1 million in sales and a cash-flow positive fourth quarter.
“It wasn’t something that we necessarily set to out achieve, so to be growing as fast as we are and to also see cash flow coming in positively was a really great sign and something that we’re all really proud of,” Tabis said.
Also participating in the round were new investors NextEquity Partners and Reimagined Ventures and existing investors Azure Capital Partners, KEC Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, and “Shark Tank’s’ Robert Herjavec.
Partech General Partner Mark Menell will join The Bouqs’ board, which also includes founders Tabis and Juan Pablow Montúfar, Paul Ferris of Azure Capital Partners; Deborah Benton, former president of Nasty Gal and executive VP of Teleflora; and former Microsoft CMO Mich Mathews.
“It is rare to find a combination of fundamental industry disruption, rapid growth and cash efficiency due to strong operating leverage in an ecommerce business at this stage,” Menell said in a statement. “Customers absolutely love The Bouqs Company, and it’s clear they are the next-generation leader in the space,” he added, citing the startup’s “tech-driven and proprietary supply chain, a stellar team and a $16B market opportunity in the U.S. alone.”
I caught up with Tabis last week to get more details about how The Bouqs will spend its Series C, what the company has been up to since we last spoke a year ago, and why the startup is hiring so many executives from the fashion industry.
How will the Bouqs use its new $24 million round?
The biggest things that we’re going to invest in are [in] two big buckets: team and tech in the…