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Crepe brought in a $ 350,000 funding round to develop their home design platform that leverages the furniture you already have in your home with a designer’s fresh eye on your space.
Maria Jose Castro, Roberto Meza and Alfredo Enciso, all from Costa Rica, started the company in 2020, based on their own experience of transitioning to working from home and the need to arrange space. However, design services can be expensive, and therefore inaccessible to everyone.
Pancake is reinventing the way you can work with an interior designer and get your workspace rendered. Customers can go to the website and book a session with a designer, providing them with measurements and photos of the room.
The designer then prepares a render of the space and deck to explain the design and how the client will do it – and if paint or furniture is needed that is not already available, Pancake will show the client where to find it. Future site features will include connecting with furniture vendors, Castro told TechCrunch.
Meza called the company ‘furniture as a service’, with the main goal of reusing what already exists in a space to create healthy and sustainable spaces in which someone can work, live and enjoy at the same time. While it might seem like a difficult task, he said with everyone suddenly being together during the global pandemic, relationships are best when people are in a space they love.
“Wellness in construction is what I do, and we wanted to create that with Pancake,†he added. “Sometimes it’s the little things that create space and make you feel good or not.”
Pancake plans to use its funding to further develop its platform and add new features like an ecological footprint calculator so customers can see how sustainable their designs are. The company also prides itself on transparent pricing. An average two-hour session with a designer costs $ 199, and the designer will add to the budget if items like paint and new furniture are needed.
Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid, is the main investor in the round table. He said he usually doesn’t invest at the seed stage, but is impressed with how much progress Pancake has made in such a short time. This includes marketing tests on social media platforms which have yielded a respectable return on investment, he added.
During this time, Pancake has hosted over 100 design sessions and has started seeing referrals and repeat customers who want to design additional rooms in their homes. This translated to 200% month-over-month revenue growth, on average, despite the four-month hiatus during the pandemic, Meza said. Then the company will continue to develop its brand and revenue model as it moves into a Series A cycle next year.
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