The best part of waking up, is $20M in your tip cup.
I drink a lot of coffee, if you can’t tell. I love coffee so much that I make it a point to hit all of the best spots in every city that I visit. One of my favorite joints in San Francisco is Blue Bottle Coffee. It’s so good that words can’t describe the taste of its coffee.
It looks like the company will be around serving us great coffee for a long time, and perhaps in cities all over the world. According to a SEC filing, Blue Bottle Coffee has raised close to $20M. Along with founder James Freeman, people listed in the filing include Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi, True Ventures’ Tony Conrad, and serial entrepreneur Bryan Meehan, who founded the popular Fresh and Wild organic stores in London, and the all-natural Nude skincare line of products.
UPDATE: We have confirmed that Index Ventures and True Ventures have both invested, with True Ventures leading the round.
UPDATE 2: True Ventures has written a post about their investment.
That’s a lot of money for a coffee shop.
Currently, there are 10 Blue Bottle shops or stands in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. The funding could mean more shops opening up in other cities. It could also mean Blue Bottle coffee becoming available for sale in grocery stores, or an expansion of its online sales channel, where users can purchase coffee by the bag, or sign up for a subscription service.
We’ve reached out to the company to check on the specifics of the deal, but we imagine that True Ventures and Index Ventures might be involved due to Tony Conrad and Mike Volpi’s involvement as advisors. This might not be the first time that they’ve raised outside funding, as Kohlberg Ventures dropped some money into the tip cup, but it is definitely the first time that they’ve filed a Form D.
Watch out Starbucks and Peet’s, Blue Bottle has a warchest. And it’s full of caffeine.
(Additional reporting by everyone in the universe but me)
Blue Bottle Coffee Co. takes a hands-on approach to every step of artisan micro-roasting to discover and preserve the true nature of excellent coffee. They use only the finest certified organic coffees, and when available, coffees that are farmed traditionally without pesticides. After roasting, coffee beans exhale carbon dioxide for several hours. Instead of keeping the Blue Bottle beans in bins, they are mixed in blends and bagged within four hours to harness carbon dioxide and keep oxygen (and...
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