I’m a bit from a bagel snob. I once baked bagels overnight with the team at Best bagels to obtain a profile of its founders at the university. I bake them at home from time to time and I still go to the bagel shop of my childhood, from abraham, practically every time I’m in New England. I keep a sesame bun shop-2371777/amp-page” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Felt bagels on my desk.
Bagels give me a certain nostalgia. I have pivotal childhood memories of driving to Abraham’s house with my dad and sister, picking up a dozen bagels, and smashing a new one to share on the way home.
So when I saw that Popup Bagels, a chain of familiar-looking bagel shops, raised venture capital, I thought. . . that? Isn’t this literally what small business loans are for? Popup Bagels raised an $8 million Series A led by Stripes, with participation from Habitat Partners and Tastemaker Capital.
Sure, BetterBrand, a startup that makes protein-rich bagels with suspiciously low amounts of carbs, recently raised $6 million in venture funding. But they are an e-commerce food tech company and that has VC written all over it. It’s not a place to go buy a bagel in person.
However, Popup Bagels founder Adam Goldberg sees it differently. He told TechCrunch+ that he’s not interested in ever going into debt (good luck with that) and that venture capital makes sense because Popup has strong demand, runs an efficient operation, and is looking to grow quickly. Two of the backers, Stripes and Tastemaker Capital, also have experience developing food startups.
“When you’re disrupting an industry and you have something that’s new and exciting, and people are excited to try it, it’s great to have capital to implement it quickly and it’s also great to have smart people behind that capital,” Goldberg said. saying. “We turned away a lot of people who wanted to write a check that didn’t really help. “Stripes has experience doing these deployments.”
If we look closer, some of that definitely rings true.
