Elan Mosbacher joined Chicago startup SpotHero at the seed round and helped scale it through 300 cities and a billion dollars in sales, learning how to take a geo-local marketplace from Chicago across the country.
With his newest online marketplace, Pinch, he's shifting from parking to medical spa services designed to provide nurse practitioners with new career opportunities.
The Evanston-based startup is launching with $3.5 million in seed funding.
The brainchild of two childhood schoolmates, Mosbacher and surgeon Dr. Jacob Avraham, Pinch offers in-home medical spa treatments across 250 zip codes with further expansion plans moving forward. The platform also helps give nurse practitioners more power over when and where they want to work, increasing their earning potential.
The company has several thousands of clients after soft launching last year.
"One of the things that I learned at SpotHero was the concept of liquidity over geography, meaning that you want to win one market before you're in many," he told Chicago Inno. "At SpotHero, we were bigger in Chicago than any of our competitors were before we started to expand. We're trying to create a similar philosophy here."
The seed round was led by Starting Line with participation from Lightbank, Ludlow Ventures, The 81 Collection and Permanent Capital, along with multiple angel investors from Chicago's startup founder community.
Pinch had interest from both local and coastal investors, but Mosbacher said he chose to take all of their initial capital from the Midwest, where the company will first launch before expanding outward.
"We chose to optimize for funds in Chicago because we wanted to do local business and were launching in Chicago," he said. "We wanted to be able to grab coffee and meet up in person with our investors."
Mosbacher felt fortunate to be able to raise funding very quickly and thinks this was likely a function of his track record.
"It was about a two-week turnaround to get the round together," he said.
