The Robot Nail Polisher(Clockwork) Raised $6.7M in a Community-led Series A.

Clockwork builds AI-powered robots to make beauty services more convenient and accessible than ever before.

🏃🏻 Rundown

founder story/problem/market-fit

With engineering and experience leading teams at Dropbox, Nvidia, e.l.f., Clorox, Toyota, and Uber, the team is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the unique opportunity in front of them. 

• Renuka Apte - CEO. Business and technical whiz. 15 years industry experience. Led infrastructure teams at Dropbox building product that impacted 700M users and used over 1B times daily. Early committer to Openstack. Ex-NVIDIA. MS from GA Tech.

• Aaron Feldstein- CTO. Engineering ace. 11 years experience in AI and infrastructure at all stages of the product life-cycle. Tech lead for Dropbox product that drove $100M+ in revenue annually.

• Erik Sunden - Founding Engineer. Scale pro. 20 years experience scaling ideas into products. Ex-Solyndra, Nanosys, Arevo Labs. MS & BS from GA Tech.

• Mara McCune - CMO. Marketing genius. 20+ years experience building brands. Built online community of 4M and led $450M CPG brand. Ex- e.l.f., Clorox, Robert W. Baird & Co. BA from Northwestern.

problem/solution

From ideation, to prototype, to commercial launch, Clockwork has brought our first product to market: a robot that paints nails faster and more accurately than a human - at half the price.

“We’ve brought automation to the nail segment of the beauty industry, but we’re just getting started. Clockwork isn’t just a beauty services robot, but a true beauty robotics enterprise reinventing the beauty industry, all while making the all important act of self-care a universal reality.”

🧐 core business model

• Upfront Paid Model + Percentage Revenue: Partners pay an upfront hardware deployment fee, a monthly fee, and a percentage of revenue generated from the services provided by the robot to end-users.

• 4 Growth Factors according to Blitzscaling:

  • Market Size

    • TAM = entire self-care market : $1.4T

    • SAM = entire beauty market: $625B

    • SOM = $12M

  • Gross Margins: 72%

  • Distribution: Salons and beauty chains.

  • Network Effects: Amazing word-of-mouth referral system.

• 2 Growth Limiters according to Blitzscaling:

  • Lack of Product-Market Fit (PMF): High NPS score(78%) and retention scores(82%) as well as the growth trajectory(250% YoY) attest for a high degree of product market fit.

  • Operational Scalability: As they scale, they will occur manufacturing limits and will have to cross the chasm in rapid hardware creation. As they scale, their software and sales teams will require to scale proportionally.

AI competitive advantage

1. Model builders, model integrators, or vertical enterprise players? Model builders. They have an impressive patented tech stack that could only be built by their team, given our unique background in robotics, cloud infrastructure, and machine learning. Clockwork has built  proprietary and scalable architecture for beauty robots, including  labeling tools, datasets, neural networks, localization, calibration techniques, and more. 

2. Data Strategy: Proprietary AI and datasets. Sophisticated software platform for rapid iteration & remote hardware servicing.

3. Direct access to customers? Yes!

why customers love it

Their customers love that they give them self-care that fits into their lives on their budget, all while delivering a seamless and delightful experience.

• “For the time & price of buying a coffee in Midtown, I can get a fresh mani. Super convenient, professional, & affordable. It's

  definitely my new afternoon pick me up!”

• “A robot manicure was the life hack I didn't know I needed! I pop in for 10min during my lunch and always have fab nails and rave about them to anyone who will listen. Thank you Clockwork for giving me this little life perk back!”

why you will too!

•  🙏 Great Investors: Clockwork is backed by Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, Pipeline Capital, and notable angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan (ex-CTO of Coinbase and former Partner at a16z), Max Mullen (Co-founder of Instacart via Product Co-op), Julie Bornstein (ex-COO Stitch Fix, ex-CMO Sephora), Dawn Dobras (fmr CEO Credo Beauty) among others. 

• 📈 Market Trend: The beauty industry is a $625B industry with a 10% CAGR. 1 in 3 Americans use it. 2/3 of women attest for quality and convenience.

• ⬆️ Traction: 18,000+ customers. $100k per installed machine. $1.9M ARR.