Fellow, a San Francisco startup for specialty coffee gear, has raised a $30 million Series B funding to expand its products, retail presence and hiring, the company announced Wednesday.
The funding brings Fellow's total raise to $40 million following a $10 million Series A haul in August from investors including Context Ventures, Y Combinator, Raaid Ahmad and Gelman Brothers. The latest round was led by NextWorld Evergreen, a San Francisco growth equity firm focused on consumer brands.
Fellow CEO Jacob Miller launched the company's first product, a coffee steeper, in 2013 out of his graduate student dorm at Stanford University with a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign which ultimately netted just under $200,000 in pledges. Another campaign launched in December 2019, for Fellow's Ode coffee bean grinder, reached its $200,000 goal in 94 minutes. The company's most popular product is its Stagg EKG Electric Kettle, which sells for $165 on its website.
This summer Fellow plans to put the new funding toward the opening of its second retail store — this one in Southern California on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice — adding to its San Francisco flagship launched in 2017 at 820 Valencia St. in the Mission. The company also plans to introduce a new product in its Carter travel mug line and expand its repertoire of services such as coffee curation and educational resources on coffee-making.
"We’ve learned that achieving our mission to help customers make exceptional coffee at home is more than just about great product design. It’s also about giving them access to the best quality beans and equipping them with guidance on how to use those products,” Miller said in a press statement. “This new funding will allow us to expand what we do and move our brand into this position.”
The company says that it has doubled in size each year since its first Kickstarter crowdfunding in 2014 and has hired executives from Apple, Google, Sephora and Tesla.
