ChargeItSpot, the Philadelphia-based startup originally founded to give shoppers a place to charge their phones while in stores, has raised $5.7 million, funds it plans to use to grow its latest business segment.
The capital is part of a $10 million growth equity round that CEO Douglas Baldasare expects to be completed in the next month. He said investors in the round include Philadelphia-based Robinhood Ventures, New Jersey-based Soundboard Angel Fund and a former C-suite executive from Philadelphia-based retailer Urban Outfitters. The completion of the $10 million round would bring the company's total funding to about $35 million, Baldasare said.
ChargeItSpot's original product, which it still uses in the market, allows shoppers to securely charge and even sanitize their devices while they browse stores. The kiosks launched in retail concepts about a decade ago. In the last two years, the company switched gears and launched ARC, or Asset Recharge Center, which allows back-of-house devices like scanners or bag-tagging devices to be checked in, tracked and charged. The company recently secured a contract with Walmart-owned Sam's Club to roll out two ARC units apiece in all 600 of its stores across the country.
The fresh funding will go toward continuing the buildout, research and development of ARC, which can help reduce a client's unnecessary electronic inventory by 30% to 40%, Baldasare said, noting that devices like scanners often go missing or become defective, a process it helps track.
"Our mode right now is to support our clients in a strategic way as we always have with the front of house, but put all net new growth efforts into ARC," Baldasare said. "It's such a costly, urgent pain point that our clients on the ARC side of the business are experiencing. They're losing devices hand over fist. It's super wasteful. We're helping them stem the bleeding at this point."
In one use case, ChargeItSpot found that ARC saved power sports retailer Comoto some $60,000 a year across employee time, fewer lost devices and not having to reinvest in such devices.
Baldasare said that in the roughly 18 months that ARC has been live, it has already become the majority of ChargeItSpot's business, but declined to disclose specifics. While ChargeItSpot's consumer-facing kiosks are mainly deployed in traditional retail stores, ARC can be used in virtually any space where employees use handheld devices, including airlines, hospitals, warehouses and grocery stores. Baldasare said the diversity of industries that have found a need for ARC opens up extensive opportunities for growth.
He said ARC has seen "latent demand."
To keep up with the growth of ARC, ChargeItSpot has tripled its product team and is continuing to hire. At present, the company's headcount is over 150 full and part-time workers.
"We are constantly hiring," Baldasare said. "There's lots to do, lots to build. What we understand is that there is pent-up demand. It's a really challenging, complex problem space."
Baldasare said his goal for 2023, besides growing the team, is to build on ARC's technology in a way that's more custom to the needs of its clients.
"There is a pretty significant permutation of all the different things that our clients need based on how they run their business," he said, noting the differences between the needs of a hospital worker, and airline bag tag system or a delivery service. "There's different requirements for each client and different rules you need to put in place and different technology that you need to build. That's how we're focusing our time."
