A little less than a year after launching, the founders of Campus Oven are looking to sell the startup.
The UT Dallas-based meal marketplace and delivery services company's decision comes as a number of its founding team graduate and amid some challenges in the wake of the pandemic. A message on its website now says final orders are due by Saturday before being discontinued.
“I think it really came down to… the co-founders have graduated,” Rohit Shenoy, Campus Oven co-founder and CEO, told NTX Inno. “I would have liked to have known COIVD would hit one month after we started.”
Shenoy said the main reason it’s looking to exit now is that Benny Rubanov, co-founder and CMO, Logan Harless, co-founder, and Gaurav Sethi, co-founder and COO have since graduated from UT Dallas, going on to land full-time tech gigs in the region. That left the team with little bandwidth to continue to grow the startup.
“It’s been pretty hand… to really scale and grow the company when three out of four people are working full-time,” Shenoy said.
The second biggest hurdle for Campus Oven was COVID-19, Shenoy said. The company launched only about a month before the pandemic hit the U.S. In the weeks before, Shenoy said the startup was delivering about 100 meals, sourced from local chefs, per week. However, with the pandemic came the closure of many college campuses, bringing down sales.
“COVID hit, and everyone left campus,” Shenoy said. “We stopped delivering for a few weeks, then a few people came back to campus, and we tried selling to them, and it wasn’t very successful.”
While Shenoy declined to disclose Campus Oven’s valuation, he said the company is in talks with a “range of people,” local startup organizations, and one of its prior backers, Dallas-based RevTech Ventures, to find a potential buyer.
The company’s relationship with RevTech goes back to May when it was one of five student-led ventures to land a $5,000 grant from the VC firm to help fight the spread of COVID-19 and safely reopen campuses.
“The biggest thing I would have liked to have known is that you should go into it thinking I want to test out this hypothesis; this might work, this might not work, but we’re going to come here and test it out. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll call it,” Shenoy said. “Instead, I think I went into it with, ‘Hey, this is going to work out, this is going to be amazing, college kids are going to love this and let’s go.’ We should have gone into it thinking, will this… work, and if so, let’s do this. And if not, then let’s not.”
While Campus Oven worked with local nonprofits to provide meals to frontline workers earlier that spring, the grant funding allowed the company to expand beyond UT Dallas to SMU. Shenoy said the Campus Oven found a little more success there, where it was able to work with some of the school’s fraternities and sororities – which have a larger campus presence than they do at UT Dallas – to substitute their house’s chefs. However, because of graduation, Shenoy said the company could not focus the time and energy needed to build out a bigger presence on both of those campuses.
“It comes back to one, it was pretty hard to sell to the other frats and sororities being an outsider,” Shenoy said. “And then… we just didn’t have the bandwidth to execute well.”
Despite some of the challenges Campus Oven has faced, Shenoy remains positive about finding a buyer for the company, noting it’s data points pre-COVID point to growth. He also said that with the company's sale comes access to its chef and driver lists and its technology.
“I think there is a lot of potential for Campus Oven’s success, and we’re excited to see if someone can take this who is in a better position than us to go and grow and scale it,” Shenoy said.
As the only co-founder still at UT Dallas, Shenoy said he is currently working on a new venture in stealth. He said the new venture is already gaining traction faster than Campus Oven while not disclosing any details.
“I’m just really trying to grow and scale that venture before I graduate,” Shenoy said.
