Q4 Featured Founder | Clockwork
The 4th New Majority founder currently fundraising from YOU this quarter.
Hello New Majority Investors! 🌞
📣📣📣 Exciting news! Our Founder and CEO, Mackenzie Loy, was nominated as DC Tech Community Leader of the Year. We’d love and appreciate if you took 20 seconds to vote for Mackenzie & for our past Featured Founder Throne for Invention of the Year. Voting ends today!
Stay tuned for some updates on our past featured founders at the end of this newsletter. Now let’s dive into our latest featured founder, Clockwork.
Clockwork
First, some context:
💸🕒Self-care is often expensive and time-consuming, yet crucial for confidence, stress reduction, and happiness.
🚫As our lives have gotten busier, self-care beauty services have remained unchanged.
💆♀️💼Americans spend an average of $3,576 a year on beauty services, losing 80+ hours in productivity during service delivery.
💅 Clockwork's first product, a nail-painting robot, outpaces humans in speed and accuracy at half the cost.
With the nail enhancement market valued at $27B, Clockwork aims to revolutionize the $1.5 trillion self-care industry, expanding access to affordable beauty services.
📈Clockwork has so far assisted over 17,000 individuals in seamlessly integrating self-care into their daily routines.
This company is made for you if:
💯You love leveraging technology for efficiency in new industries.
💸📅You want cheaper, hassle-free nail appointments for you and your friends and family.
Tell me more
🤝🎯Clockwork has developed proprietary and scalable beauty robots. Using structured light cameras, their robots capture over 100 images of the nail within a second, creating a precise 3D map. They aim to provide speedy ~10 minute nail appointments for just $10-$15. Leveraging a custom AI network, Clockwork achieves sub-millimeter accuracy, ensuring precise painting and avoiding unwanted streaks. They are B2B & B2C, collaborating with commercial and residential real estate operators, retailers, salons, spas, and other partners to introduce beauty services robots everywhere their customers go regularly. Clockwork’s goal is to provide a delightful and convenient experience for customers.
Convinced? Invest today in Clockwork.
The details
Industry: 💅🏾💅 💆🏻♀️ Beauty & Personal Care Services, 🖥️ Tech
Impact: Clockwork promotes industry, innovation, & infrastructure (SDG 9) & advances responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) 🔬 🔄 🌍
Team Diversity: Woman Of Color Co-Founder & CEO
HQ: San Francisco
Company size: 2-10
Year founded: 2018
Key investors: 🏦🔒 With over $5 million raised from prominent investors, Clockwork is now open to a community investment round to the public, led by Arash Ferdowski, Dropbox Co-Founder and former CTO. Their most recent round in March 2022 raised $5,300,000 / Seed from Arash Ferdowsi and 4 other investors.
🤝🌐Prominent investors include:
Arash Ferdowsi (founder & ex-CTO Dropbox)
Julie Bornstein (ex-COO Stitch Fix, ex-CMO Sephora)
Vivian Chu (Co-founder & CTO, Diligent Robotics)
Max Mullen (Co-founder of Instacart)
Investment type: SAFE (Future Equity)*
💡 *A SAFE allows an investor to make a cash investment in a company, with rights to receive certain company stock at a later date, in connection with a specific event.
💸 Valuation: $37.5M (If you invest you’re betting the company will be worth more than $37.5M eventually.)
📈 SAFEs are used by early-stage startups because they delay the difficult task of figuring out how much a startup is worth.
📊Investor Perks: *Invest US$250+ and get a 20% Discount on Clockwork Services for 1 year.
Goal and Deadline: Not yet announced
Amount Invested: $6,243,594 (*oversubscribed! But still open!)
Number of Investors: 806
Min investment: $100
Early traction:
🏦Clockwork’s traction includes impressive $1.5M annual recurring revenue (ARR) in signed contracts, with 35% month-over-month ARR growth since Q1 2023.
🛫Clockwork’s AI-powered robots have already been deployed at iconic US locations, including major airports in NY, DC, and Miami, at the Rockefeller Center in NY, in downtown SF, and in Beverly Hills. (Business Wire)
🔒Included on Allure Magazine’s 2023 A-List for Clockwork's commitment to “using AI for good and making lives easier in the process."
🚀Clockwork secured the #1 spot on “Most Raised” Wefunder and has also been featured as #1 on Wefunder’s front page! Closing in on $1M crowdfunded!
Founding team
Renuka Apte, CEO & Co-Founder. A business and technical whiz with over 15 years of industry experience. Led infrastructure teams at Dropbox building products that impacted 700M users and used over 1B times daily. Early committer to OpenStack. MS from GA Tech.
Aaron Feldstein, CTO & Co-Founder. Clockwork’s engineering ace with 11 years experience in AI and infrastructure at all stages of the product life-cycle. Former tech lead for Dropbox.
Due diligence
Pros:
🚀Increased annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 25% from $1.5M ARR to $1.9M ARR. Recently closed on 14 new locations, representing $400K in ARR!
💼TRIPLED contract size with airport retail giant Paradies Ladargere and expanded partnership with XWELL to deploy a second tranche of robots.
🦺Recognized as a runner-up in Beauty Independent’s Beacon Awards in the highly coveted Product Innovation category.
📣Clockwork’s tech has been praised by Good Morning America, the Today Show, The New York Times, Allure, CNN, CNET, Glossy, Vogue, Refinery29, and many others.
📈With over 18,000 customers served and with 10,000+ requests to lease a Clockwork robot, demand is SOARING.
Potential risks:
⚖️Clockwork is stepping into a highly competitive marketplace.
🛠️Plans to add new services, a mobile app, and expand internationally pose potential business risks, including increased costs, competition, infrastructure requirements, legal challenges, and uncertainties in foreign markets.
🚧 As the company grows its robot fleet to thousands of units, there is a risk of infrastructure strain that could result in system breakdowns, service interruptions, and degraded user experiences.
Competitors
While Clockwork is competing with established nail salons across the country, its differentiator is a more affordable, hassle-free, and convenient solution for nail care.
Why Clockwork: Clockwork combines AI, robots, and proprietary tech to support rapid iterations and growth that are redefining the beauty experience, starting with your nails. With a deep team from renowned companies such as Dropbox, Nvidia, e.l.f. Beauty, Clorox, Uber, and Toyota, they are well positioned to scale locations and grow product offerings to different types of nail treatments and other beauty sectors (including skincare, hair, lashes, and more).
Convinced? Invest today in Clockwork.
A Few Updates!
🥄🌿Painterland Sisters, pioneering the future of sustainable dairy farming and yogurt production, was named to Forbes Food & Beverage 30 under 30 list! Check out their update here.
🚽🌟Throne, the company building a network of clean, reliable, and smart public bathrooms to expand bathroom accessibility for everyone, was nominated as Invention of the Year for Technically Awards.
👶🛫🌎 BabyQuip is transforming vacations, making them more accessible for families with young children. They have raised over $1M on their campaign and are leading Start Engine as the company with the most momentum. The deadline to invest is 12/11. Listen to our podcast episode with Fran for the inside scoop and a sweet discount on your first rental!