Bloomscape’s Justin Mast explains how he built a thriving garden startup in Detroit

Published April 13, 2021

Justin Mast has a simple reason for starting his plant retail startup Bloomscape in Detroit.

“This is home,” he told me. “This is where I have a really strong network and I knew I’d be able to find a lot of support.”

Mast didn’t grow up in Detroit proper, but he’s from Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second-largest city. He recalled a weekend in Detroit after finishing graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, when he was “totally blown away” by the city’s energy.

And when it came time to launch Bloomscape in 2018, Mast said it made sense to do so from Detroit because of Michigan’s “strong heritage in the horticulture industry” — in floriculture, for example, it ranks as one of the biggest producers in the United States.

That heritage isn’t abstract to him. Mast said his family has been involved in the industry for five generations on his father’s side (including three generations in the Netherlands) and three generations on his mother’s. He worked in the family greenhouse as a child and even starting a roadside plant stand.

Image Credits: Bloomscape

“This was my version of a lemonade stand,” he said — albeit a lemonade stand that became popular enough that Mast needed to recruit his siblings for help, and that eventually provided him with enough money to buy a used car.

Bloomscape launched in 2018, and Mast said that from the beginning, the startup’s advantage was “to really know the ins and outs of the business.” That allowed Bloomscape to ship larger plants (like birds of paradise and Chinese fan palms), and more recently to expand with outdoor plants and garden “bloom kits.”

“By focusing on one of the least glamorized parts of this industry, the supply chain, we are able to design this process for shipping larger plants, at scale, throughout the country,” he said. “We’re shipping out tropical plants in the dead of winter, thousands of times a week, with a real high level of consistency. We know the plants really well, we how they perform, how they move through a supply chain, we know the nuances of FedEx and UPS, we know what growers are growing quality product.”

Bloomscape has raised a total of $24 million, most recently in a Series B last fall led by General Catalyst, with participation from Annox Capital’s Bob Mylod, Home Depot board member Jeff Boyd, former Seventh Generation and Burt’s Bees CEO John Replogle and existing investors Revolution Ventures and Ludlow Ventures.

Bloomscape bloom kits. Image Credits: Bloomscape

When I asked whether investors had ever pressured him to move the startup to Silicon Valley, Mast said, “We’ve had successful funding rounds, but even in most successful rounds, not everyone’s going to be the right fit.” So it sounds like the issue came up, but Mast made sure that everyone who actually invested saw the startup’s location as an advantage, or at least “if they saw it as a disadvantage, they were willing to overlook it.”

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Nor has the location proven to be an issue when it comes to hiring. Mast said the company successfully lured Aaron Averbuch (formerly based in Seattle and a vice president of engineering at Placed and Snap) to Detroit to become CTO. He also noted that Detroit is close to the University of Michigan, and that “all the schools in Chicago and Pittsburgh are within a few hours’ drive.”

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Mast added that the last six months have been “a particularly exciting time” to run a startup in Detroit, with the success of companies like StockX, Floyd and Autobooks.

“We’re thrilled to be here,” he said.

Investors cozy up to LA-based ettitude’s bamboo bedding and sleep wear with $1.6 million

Published May 14, 2020

Ettitude, the Los Angeles-based, direct-to-consumer startup making sustainable bedding and sleepwear from bamboo fibers, has raised a sustainably sized round that should keep the company going even in the face of an economic recession.

Co-founded by the Melbourne, Australia native Phoebe Yu and serial entrepreneur Kat Dey, ettitude sells high-end bamboo bedding made using a process she first heard about in her old job working as an exporter helping chain stores source textiles in China.

Sourced from a factory in Zhejiang, China, near Shanghai, the bamboo textiles are made using non-toxic solvents and a closed-loop system that reuses water for the process, according to Yu.

Yu started selling the cleanBamboo-branded bedding under the ettitude label in Melbourne first, but when she saw the orders begin to pick up from the U.S. she relocated and took her company with her.

Upon arrival, Yu realized she’d need a strong co-founder with experience in branding to help her navigate the massive market in the U.S. So Yu turned to AngelList, which is where she found Dey.

A serial entrepreneur with a background in retail, whose first company TryTheWorld was acquired by EarthBox in 2017, Dey was looking for her next project.

“Phoebe sent me a sample and I had the best night of sleep in my life,” Dey said. From then on the two co-founders began the long, hard slog of marketing their business.

Sales are growing, according to the two women, and the company’s chances have certainly been improved by the capital infusion from Drumbeat Ventures and TA Ventures, a European female-founded fund focusing on technology innovation.

The $1.6 million financing will be used to boost sales and marketing as the company expands beyond bedding — with an average price of $178 for a queen-sized sheet set — and into sleepwear and other categories.

“Phoebe, Kat and their brand, ettitude, are as genuine a combination of passion, purpose, and proprietary product that I’ve seen in the marketplace in my 20 years,” said Drumbeat Ventures founder, Adam Burgoon, in a statement. “They are perfectly positioned to bring their mission of sustainability and comfort to a broader audience.”

Ginkgo Bioworks’ dev shop for genetic programming is now worth $4 billion

Published September 19, 2019

Ginkgo Bioworks is now worth $4 billion after a $290 million capital infusion that will give the company the cash to dramatically expand its developer shop for genetic programming.

The Boston-based company is one of a handful of U.S.-based early-stage companies that are on the forefront of developing the tools to modify genetic material for everyday applications.

“Cells are programmable similar to computers because they run on digital code in the form of DNA,” said Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, in a statement. “Ginkgo has the best compiler and debugger for writing genetic code and we use it to program cells for customers in a range of industries. Today’s fundraise will allow us to expand our technology and continue our drive to bring biology into every physical goods industry — materials, clothing, electronics, food, pharmaceuticals and more. They are all biotech industries but just don’t know it yet.”

Ginkgo makes money in two ways. The company sells its development services to anyone who comes in with an idea. Kelly said that it’d be like any agreement with an entrepreneur who hires a coding shop to develop an application.

For example, if an entrepreneur wanted to develop houseplants that smelled like roses or lilies, they could approach Ginkgo, pay a (not-insignificant) fee and Ginkgo would do the research into designing something like a lily-scented fern. (Kelly puts the sticker price on that kind of development somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million, so a founder best believe their product can sell.)

“You don’t need to come in with deep biological know-how,” Kelly says. “The question is, is capital interested in the problem?”

The other way that Ginkgo is approaching the market is by taking equity stakes in businesses that rely on its technology.

Those take the form of joint ventures with companies like Bayer (the first joint venture partner for Ginkgo) and the launch of Joyn, a $100 million spin-out that was created in the summer of 2018.

The two companies are collaborating on the development of seeds that require less fertilizer for growth — something that could save the industry millions and decrease pollution associated with traditional chemical fertilizers.

Since that first spin-out, Ginkgo has created three other companies and joint ventures. There’s the $122 million deal to produce rare cannabinoids with the Canadian cannabis company, Cronos; a partnership with Roche that was born out of Ginkgo’s acquisition of Warp Drive Bio; and Motif Foodworks, which is working on manufacturing alternative proteins with a $120 million in financing.*

Alongside these large-scale initiatives, Ginkgo has signed partnerships with the West Coast powerhouse accelerator program from Y Combinator and a new Boston-based life sciences-focused group called Petri to conduct development work for startups from those programs in exchange for an equity stake.

“We’re not going to have all the good ideas,” says Kelly. “We want to tap the much larger pool of smart people and really have them building on our platform. Of all of the people we can give value to, we can give the most to startups. If we can offer them to do their biowork without all of the fixed costs of building a lab,” that’s valuable, he says.

Investors in the company include Y Combinator, DCVC, MassChallenge, Felicis Ventures, General Atlantic, Baillie Gifford, Bill Gates and Viking Global.

* An earlier version of this article mentioned three company spinouts. The collaborations with Roche and Cronos are not independent companies.