TORONTO, March 7, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – Daily Blends, an AI tech company disrupting the automated food-service industry with smart vending machines offering fresh, healthy food options, today announced its US$2 million in investment co-led by San Francisco-based Hustle Fund and New York-based 2048 Ventures.
This financing will accelerate Daily Blends’ plan to deploy its AI-powered smart vending machines at many locations across the Metrolinx network, starting with Union Station. These vending machines will offer high-quality, fresh food to millions of commuters in the Greater Toronto Hamilton area.
Consumer demand for healthy yet affordable food has increased at a time when the price of food, real estate, and labor have increased. Daily Blends is fulfilling that demand through its data-centric retail platform and delivering healthier food options offered in a smarter way. The result is a healthy, fresh food option for an average price of $6, notably less than the cost of a typical fast-casual meal.
The company’s software analyzes real-time sales, inventory, and user data from each vending machine, generating multi-level user, location and network insights and powering a highly optimized end-to-end supply chain achieving high product availability and minimal food waste.
Daily Blends’ in-house technology and algorithms generate insights on accurate demand forecasts, most optimum assortments, share of shelf, promotions, product recommendations, fueling high customer retention, while optimizing delivery schedules and minimizing out of stocks.
“The combination of powerful data insights and plug-and-play smart vending machines, further combined with an omnichannel experience, helps us address new-age, evolving consumer needs while keeping our model agile and removing the heavy capital and labor costs associated with traditional retail formats,” said Shriya Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Daily Blends. “We’re excited to bring affordable, healthy options to Toronto commuters and we look forward to expanding our reach with our additional funding.”
“Daily Blends is unique and is reimagining the convenience of healthy food for on-the-go consumers,” said Elizabeth Yin, general partner of Hustle Fund. “Their strong back-end technology tied to third-party-vending machines makes them asset-light and highly scalable. We are thrilled to support the company and look forward to their growth and further success.”
“We’re excited to work with Daily Blends to bring high quality, convenient and healthier food options to our customers,” said Mark Childs, Chief Marketing Officer, Metrolinx. “This partnership will help enhance the customer experience, with on-the-go food and beverage choices to help make their journey on GO Transit and UP Express even more enjoyable.”
In addition to its agreement with Metrolinx, Daily Blends is powering smart vending machines at the largest university in Canada, University of Toronto, at hospitals and factories and plans to expand aggressively in the U.S. later in 2023.
About Daily Blends
Daily Blends is a technology company developing AI software powering smart vending machines. This approach generates rich granular data insights enabling a highly customized user experience while minimizing costs and maximizing revenue. Founded by sisters Shriya Gupta and Purva Gupta in 2020, Daily Blends operates an extensive network of AI-powered smart vending machines serving high-quality meals that goes beyond traditional restaurants to help capture real-time inventory data and strategically gather more information about consumers than ever before - information that can be processed and analyzed to provide useful insights. To learn more about Daily Blends, visit www.dailyblends.com.
About Metrolinx
Metrolinx is leading the largest transit expansion program in North America while GO Transit, UP Express and PRESTO take our customers everywhere they want to go around the Greater Golden Horseshoe today. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build transit will create endless possibilities in our region, economic and environmental benefits for generations to come, full of exciting new services for our customers, as well as being a catalyst for change in our communities.
About Hustle Fund
Hustle Fund is a pre-seed/seed-stage fund based in San Francisco and Singapore founded in 2017 by Elizabeth Yin, Shiyan Koh, and Eric Bahn. From their combined experience as successful founders, tech employees, and investors, Hustle Fund's General Partners learned that, despite entrenched stereotypes in the venture world, great founders look like anyone and come from anywhere. Hustle Fund's core investment strategy is to invest in teams who demonstrate relentless speed and execution (defined as 'hustle') and has turned the VC model on its head. The investment team reviews over 600 deals per month, moves quickly to invest a modest initial check, and then works with the founder to monitor their speed/execution before qualifying startups for a larger, concentrated checks. Hustle Fund has developed an incredible global reputation with founders and investors alike.
Media Contact:
Chris Kooistra, Skyya PR for Daily Blends: chris@skyya.com or (773) 972-0691.
