We’re excited to announce that we’re leading Per Diem’s $2.3M seed round.
At Two Sigma Ventures, we’ve been passionate about the potential of technology to provide value to brick-and-mortar businesses, which are a bedrock of our society. Several of us even started our careers as founders selling services to restaurants, and we have been tracking this space for many years. This segment has faced many challenges in the past decade: the rise of ecommerce, delivery services that provide distribution but also take a large portion of revenue, and of course the pandemic.
The last 12 months have been among the most challenging times for small businesses in modern history. We have been thinking about how brick-and-mortar shops can not only recover, but can emerge with stronger businesses than ever before. That’s where Per Diem comes in. They are creating a service that makes it easy for any local business to add subscriptions to their offerings. We think this is exciting on several levels. First, well run local businesses tend to have a set of loyal customers. Businesses should have the ability to translate this loyalty to long-term relationships in the form of subscriptions that allow the business to deliver products and services on an ongoing basis. For consumers, Per Diem aims to make it easy to both discover and connect with the businesses in their backyards, from breweries to bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants, farmers markets, and more. Imagine subscribing to your favorite sushi meal, or a weekly delivery of flowers in exchange for a discount or special perks. The subscription model helps to remove the cognitive load of having to plan in advance – your favorites just show up on a regular basis.
From the perspective of the local businesses, the Per Diem service allows the possibility of transforming a portion of their revenue from a la carte purchases to long-term, predictable revenue. We have all seen the rise of SAAS and the subscription economy so we know how valuable this can be. However, it’s not a trivial feat to offer a high-quality subscription service, especially from a product and engineering perspective. Per Diem is developing the software intended to make it simple for businesses to develop, market, and operate subscriptions as part of their offerings. We firmly believe Tomer Molovinsky and Doron Segal are the right founders for this challenge. They have spent years building software for restaurants at Resy and OpenTable. Per Diem already has a variety of fantastic customers on the platform in the NY and DC areas, including Norman’s Farm Market, IXV Coffee, and Sarge’s Deli. We’re looking forward to seeing them put their recent funding towards expanding into new locations, developing the two-sided marketplace, with plans to scale both the merchant and consumer platforms, and building out fulfillment tools for merchants that are slated to include a merchant iOS app to allow businesses to seamlessly check-in subscribers.
We believe Per Diem has the potential to bring immense value to local businesses as well as their most loyal customers. If you’d like to learn more about Per Diem, check out their blog post here.