self-storage
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OpenUnit raises a $1M seed round to be the online face of self-storage
How are mom-and-pop self-storage facilities meant to keep up with the tech offered by the massive, ever-growing chains?
That’s a key part of the idea behind OpenUnit, a team I first wrote about in August of last year. You bring the storage units, they bring the website, payment processing and backend tools you need to manage them. They don’t charge facility owners a monthly subscription fee, instead taking a cut of each payment as the payments processor.
OpenUnit has now raised a $1 million seed round, and acquired the IP of a fellow YC company along the way.
Since we last heard from OpenUnit, they’ve been expanding to locations around the U.S. and Canada, and now have a waitlist over 800 facilities deep, the team tells me.
Image Credits: OpenUnit
OpenUnit co-founder Taylor Cooney was quick to point out that this seed round is as much about strategic partnerships as it is about the money. Neither Taylor nor co-founder Lucas Playford had much to do with the storage industry until a knock at the door led them down a rabbit hole. As I wrote back in August:
…Taylor’s landlords came to him with an offer: they wanted to sell the place he was renting, and they’d give him a stack of cash if he could be out within just a few days. Pulling that off meant finding a place to keep all of his stuff while he looked for a new home, which is when he realized how antiquated the self-storage process could be.
Of the 20+ investors participating in the round, six are from the self-storage industry, from prior/current facility owners to the director of the Canadian Self Storage Association. For some of them, it’s their first time investing in a tech or software company — but all potentially bring something to the table beyond money.
Of course, that’s not to say they’re just letting that money sit around. They’ve grown the team from just Taylor and Lucas up to five, and are still looking to grow. Meanwhile, Taylor tells me the company has acquired the IP of fellow Y Combinator W20 batchmate Affiga, a product that aimed to automatically provide insights about a new customer after a transaction is made.
Writes Taylor: “As self-storage companies move services like rentals, leases, and payments online, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to ‘know’ their customers. We see the integration into our product as a way to help self-storage operators bridge the gap between their online and in-store customer experiences, where the personal touch tends to be lost.”
Affiga initially shut down its operations back in 2020. After OpenUnit realized they wanted something similar in their product, they set out to buy rather than build. “With a decade in e-commerce under their belt,” Taylor tells me, “their founder had a much better approach to this then we would’ve come up with.”
So what’s next? Besides getting more people off the waitlist and onto the platform, they’re exploring other opportunities, including potentially providing loans to facilities looking to expand or renovate. Because OpenUnit is both the management platform and the payments provider, they have deep insights on how a facility is doing; they know how much a location makes, how punctual their customers are with payments, etc. Take that data and mash it up with insights on what improvements can increase revenue, and it seems like a pretty straightforward formula.
This round includes investment from Garage Capital, Advisors Fund, Insite Property Group, SquareFoot co-founder Jonathan Wasserstrum, and a number of angel investors.
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Saltbox raises $10.6M to help booming e-commerce stores store their goods
E-commerce is booming, but among the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs of online businesses are finding a place to store the items they are selling and dealing with the logistics of operating.
Tyler Scriven, Maxwell Bonnie and Paul D’Arrigo co-founded Saltbox in an effort to solve that problem.
The trio came up with a unique “co-warehousing” model that provides space for small businesses and e-commerce merchants to operate as well as store and ship goods, all under one roof. Beyond the physical offering, Saltbox offers integrated logistics services as well as amenities such as the rental of equipment and packing stations and access to items such as forklifts. There are no leases and tenants have the flexibility to scale up or down based on their needs.
“We’re in that sweet spot between co-working and raw warehouse space,” said CEO Scriven, a former Palantir executive and Techstars managing director.
Saltbox opened its first facility — a 27,000-square-foot location — in its home base of Atlanta in late 2019, filling it within two months. It recently opened its second facility, a 66,000-square-foot location, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that is currently about 40% occupied. The company plans to end 2021 with eight locations, in particular eyeing the Denver, Seattle and Los Angeles markets. Saltbox has locations slated to come online as large as 110,000 square feet, according to Scriven.
The startup was founded on the premise that the need for “co-warehousing and SMB-centric logistics enablement solutions” has become a major problem for many new businesses that rely on online retail platforms to sell their goods, noted Scriven. Many of those companies are limited to self-storage and mini-warehouse facilities for storing their inventory, which can be expensive and inconvenient.
Scriven personally met with challenges when starting his own e-commerce business, True Glory Brands, a retailer of multicultural hair and beauty products.
“We became aware of the lack of physical workspace for SMBs engaged in commerce,” Scriven told TechCrunch. “If you are in the market looking for 10,000 square feet of industrial warehouse space, you are effectively pushed to the fringes of the real estate ecosystem and then the entrepreneurial ecosystem at large. This is costing companies in significant but untold ways.”
Now, Saltbox has completed a $10.6 million Series A round of financing led by Palo Alto-based Playground Global that included participation from XYZ Venture Capital and proptech-focused Wilshire Lane Partners in addition to existing backers Village Global and MetaProp. The company plans to use its new capital primarily to expand into new markets.
The company’s customers are typically SMB e-commerce merchants “generating anywhere from $50,000 to $10 million a year in revenue,” according to Scriven.
He emphasizes that the company’s value prop is “quite different” from a traditional flex office/co-working space.
“Our members are reliant upon us to support critical workflows,” Scriven said.
Besides e-commerce occupants, many service-based businesses are users of Saltbox’s offering, he said, such as those providing janitorial services or that need space for physical equipment. The company offers all-inclusive pricing models that include access to loading docks and a photography studio, for example, in addition to utilities and Wi-Fi.
Image Credits: Saltbox
Image Credits: Saltbox
The company secures its properties with a mix of buying and leasing by partnering with institutional real estate investors.
“These partners are acquiring assets and in most cases, are funding the entirety of capital improvements by entering into management or revenue share agreements to operate those properties,” Scriven said. He said the model is intentionally different from that of “notable flex space operators.”
“We have obviously followed those stories very closely and done our best to learn from their experiences,” he added.
Investor Adam Demuyakor, co-founder and managing partner of Wilshire Lane Partners, said his firm was impressed with the company’s ability to “structure excellent real estate deals” to help them continue to expand nationally.
He also believes Saltbox is “extremely well-positioned to help power and enable the next generation of great direct to consumer brands.”
Playground Global General Partner Laurie Yoler said the startup provides a “purpose-built alternative” for small businesses that have been fulfilling orders out of garages and self-storage units.
Saltbox recently hired Zubin Canteenwalla to serve as its chief operating officer. He joined Saltbox from Industrious, an operator co-working spaces, where he was SVP of Real Estate. Prior to Industrious, he was EVP of Operations at Common, a flexible residential living brand, where he led the property management and community engagement teams.
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