Espresso Machine IoT Startup BibeCoffee Lands $2.2 Million Round

Image via BibeCoffee.com.

Greek coffee machine technology startup BibeCoffee has secured a US$2.2 million funding round led by Bulgarian investment firm Eleven Ventures.

Founded in Athens in 2018, BibeCoffee offers IoT-based monitoring software for espresso machines and other coffee equipment, with a target client base of coffee shops, coffee retail chains and coffee roasters. The company describes its telemetry platform as “machine-agnostic,” meaning it can be retrofitted to any coffee machines for connection to the cloud.

The $2.2 million investment follows an initial seed round 15 months ago for BibeCoffee, which was founded by Vasilis Apostolopoulos, Panos Vrettos and Kostas Sigalas, three former executives at the British multinational telecommunications company Vodafone.

The latest investment round was joined by existing investors Venture Friends, Uni.Fund and Silcon Valley-based angel investors.

“Growth for BibeCoffee for the upcoming years is very promising and we are already experiencing high customer demands,” Apostolopoulos, who serves as BibeCoffee CEO, said in an announcement from the company. “Our planned coffee machines installations are to have tens of thousands by the end of 2023 and reach millions of installed machines in the upcoming years.”

The investment comes just over three months since Eleven Ventures invested in another European coffee-focused tech startup, Almacena. Eleven led a $3.4 million round to help the Dutch startup build its online green coffee marketplace focused on African coffees.

The investment also comes less than a year after espresso machine equipment giant La Marzocco first introduced its own cloud-connected IoT machines in the commercial marketplace in the United States. Two months later, La Marzocco and coffee roasting software company Cropster unveiled Cropster Cafe, a software solution incorporating LM’s internet-connected commercial machines.

Meanwhile, another major espresso machine maker, Simonelli Group, has also launched its own telemetry-based data collection platform for espresso machines, called TECX.

A more direct comparison might be made to Australia-based Flow, whose telemetry devices are designed to be retrofitted to any number of machines. 

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