Snackpass acquires Sleek ????

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Snackpass is acquiring my company, Sleek bringing in a new era of line free ordering to the world! ????

The road to our acquisition had been an interesting one, filled with conversations with many public & venture backed private companies in our space (Shout out to Derick from TI Partners for all those warm intros) but our interactions with Snackpass started on the right foot from the very first minute - we share the same vision to end waiting in lines and were amazed by their strong product, growth & especially the team that Snackpass has built. Kevin, Jamie & the entire Snackpass team - thank you for being such fantastic hosts and making this transition as smooth as possible for our team.?

My co-founder, Gaurav & I had our number 1 priority to optimize our best for the investors as well as our early team that took a giant leap of faith in us. We are happy to finish off with an impressive return in terms of cash and valuable stock in Snackpass, and our entire team joining them as a result of this acquisition.

Looking back on our rollercoaster of a journey, Sleek started with a simple idea, economics 101 - supply and demand should meet each other. We realized that giant lines are a sign of inefficient pricing and decided to address this bringing dynamic pricing to waiting in lines, and let anyone that hated to wait pay a little extra to skip it.?

You might have been at many a bakery or a restaurant where the line is out the door and around the block. The customers either are forced to wait in the line or walk away. That’s where Sleek’s technology comes in.

Sleek is a dynamic pricing tool that drives incremental revenue for high-demand venues. We collect, merge & train our deep-learning models on several streams of data sources including but not limited to the historical data sources such as point-of-sale systems data, GPS app data, security camera feeds, real time occupancy, time, day, weather, location, etc as well as wait-time data from our own proprietary sensors that we developed.

While initially focussed on a direct to consumer approach, we quickly pivoted to building APIs for enterprises. Our powerful and yet sleek (pun intended) APIs merely with inserting one line of code </> can calculate an accurate down to minute ETA in real time as well as a dynamic price that a customer is willing to pay to avoid that wait time. A model we see openly used by UberEats & Instacart albeit for delivery & not pickup.

A model we see openly used by UberEats & Instacart Delivery now.?

Very quickly we raised money from many blue chip investors such as Lightspeed & BAM Ventures amongst , filed multiple patents, made $5k+ from a festival purely from the dynamic fees at our peak, built customer pipelines to host over 400+ festivals in a year, served thousands of customers, and finally we were the youngest company to be featured on the Forbes AI 50 list - America’s 50 Most AI Companies for 2021. We did this as a small team of 8 folks!

While the COVID-19 forced us to shift our focus from live events to SMBs, we still built partnerships with some of the largest networks of food trucks in the country and continued to grow. Shout out to Roaming Hunger - Ross, Dan & Mircea to have been an amazing partner here opening up their network of over 18,000+ businesses. This is a great source of revenue to these popular SMBs, as virtually the dynamic fee is at 100% profit to them.

We continue to support SMBs as we join Snackpass, Series B+ startup backed by an impressive roster of investors including YC, A16Z & First Round Capital,?last valued at $400M. Snackpass is one of the world’s fastest growing order ahead platforms with the power of social with over 80% adoption at many universities and 8x YoY growth. More recently, they have begun selling integrated order kiosks with the goal of eliminating physical human cashiers as well as a full suite of hardware tools for restaurants including a full KDS and back of the house system.

Now that this chapter of my life is over, and reflecting back, it’s been immensely educational and I have personally grown a lot through this seed startup experience - fundraising, building the product & technology, hiring, firing, getting customers & revenue to finally being acquired -- we tasted it all.?

Gives me that very feeling when I swam my very first lap ever, albeit in the world of startups, this was a pond and someday I hope to plunge into the oceans

?Looking forward to the next chapter joining Snackpass’s journey! ????

PS. We are hiring, building a team of 50+ engineers with the crazy growth that Snackpass is seeing lately. Reach out if you or anyone you know is interested in joining this rocketship!