- The Greek IoT real-time monitoring startup turning coffee machines into smart connected terminals, BibeCoffee raises €2.1M in a post-seed round led by Eleven Ventures. The participation of the Sofia-based early-stage VC is €1.2M.
- The other €0.9M comes from existing investors Venture Friends and Uni.Fund, and from a couple of strategic angel investors based in Silicon Valley.
- The new investment comes only 15 months after BibeCoffee’s seed round and will be used for the further development of the startup’s AI decision-making capability, the development of white-label solutions for coffee machine manufacturers, and for team expansion in the US and Asia.
Being already trusted by customers from over 20 countries, BibeCoffee’s telemetry SaaS platform helps coffee chains and roasters connect any type of coffee machine or grinder to the cloud. The startup uses IoT-powered technology to allow coffee roasters and distributors, coffee machine makers, chains, and shop owners to standardize cup quality, maximize revenues, detect fraud and coffee dilution, predict coffee machine malfunctions, and streamline maintenance.
“Growth for BibeCoffee for the upcoming years is very promising and we are already experiencing high customer demands. Our plans for coffee machine installations are to have tens of thousands by the end of 2023 and reach millions of installed machines in the upcoming years. The investment will increase our footprint in existing markets and expand our global presence,” Vasilis Apostolopoulos, co-founder and CEO of BibeCoffee, shares.
After raising its $2M seed round in August 2021, the IoT coffee machines monitoring company released an enhanced IoT device that allows customers to remotely manage, control, and configure the whole fleet of machines without the need to visit each one. In essence, clients install the BibeCoffee IoT devices inside the coffee machines they wish to monitor. The devices then pair with the coffee machines and connect to the cloud in order to provide analytics on the quality of each coffee cup.
“BibeCoffee is taking an industry serving 2 billion cups of coffee per day into the next age. The team has great experience and chemistry, which has helped them land some of the biggest enterprises in the sector as customers, a prerequisite for the company to become the preferred solution in the industry. Eleven is excited to help the company conquer the coffee market first, laying the ground for further rollout into adjacent categories, such as beers and other beverages.
This is our second investment alongside Almacena in only a few months in a coffee-related business. The two companies naturally complement each other as they both contribute towards sustainability, efficiency, and traceability along different aspects of the value chain,” Ivaylo Simov, Managing Partner at Eleven Ventures, tells us.
The rise of IoT coffee monitoring
Even though many technological companies have recognized the untapped potential of the $225B coffee industry market, most of them develop solutions that improve the coffee quality in the production stage. BibeCoffee fills in this market chain gap and provides customers with a tool that controls in a standardized method whether high-quality coffee reaches the end customer’s cup.
Founded by Panagiotis Vrettos, Kostas Sigalas, and Vasilis Apostolopoulos in 2019, BibeCoffee has the vision to introduce data-driven digital transformation across the entire coffee production chain.
The IoT coffee machine monitoring device of BibeCoffee is being used by some of the largest coffee machine manufacturers worldwide, making their product a “plug and play” solution for 75% of the coffee machines globally.
