Lunchbox - Startup of the Year

Company: Lunchbox, New York, NY
Entry Submitted By: North 6th Agency, Inc. (N6A) is an award-winning brand communications and social media agency.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Startup of the Year - Business Products Industries

Nomination Title: Lunchbox: Startup of the Year - Business Product Industries

Lunchbox, founded in 2019, is the next-gen enterprise platform empowering restaurants to recapture digital ordering from third-party marketplaces, enabling better customer experience, customer data, and higher profits. Since January 1, 2020, Lunchbox rapidly achieved monumental accomplishments, all laid out below.

Lunchbox was co-founded by Nabeel Alamgir, who is now the CEO of Lunchbox, and who immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh as a teenager, starting his career as the first busboy at the first Bareburger, a New York-based better-burger chain. At this time he didn’t speak English, but quickly became fluent in the language, and rapidly rose in rank at the chain, eventually leading the marketing and technology departments as Chief Marketing Officer at just 25 years old. At his time here he helped Bareburger expand from 5 locations in New York to over 40 locations across the world, and developed a tech-stack that defined the brand as a leader in restaurant-tech adoption.

Throughout this extensive first-hand experience in the restaurant industry, he quickly grew tired of the exhaustive and fractured journey of solving omnichannel digital ordering and decided to build the perfect solution for the industry: Lunchbox.

Lunchbox/Pandemic
-Lunchbox was built to save the restaurant industry from third-party marketplaces, such as UberEats and Grubhub, who take advantage of restaurants by scaling fees as high as 30% of the top of each order, which adds to the financial strain on restaurants. Lunchbox helps create a healthy system for restaurants by providing affordable solutions that allow them to take back their digital ordering and pocket more profit, some of which have been released since March.

Help Main Street
-Nabeel partnered with early-stage investment firm ENIAC Ventures to launch Help Main Street, 48 hours after restaurants in NYC were forced to close in March.
-Help Main Street is a directory of local businesses (over 120,000 that span across all 50 states), to help patrons support local restaurants during the pandemic. Users are able to order online, buy gift cards or donate directly to provide critical cash support.
-Site users enter their city or zip and are presented with options from its list of businesses. Users can also add search filters, such as “Black-owned businesses.”

Series A
-In October, 2020 Lunchbox announced it raised a $20M Series-A round led by Coatue to further accelerate its growth.

Awards
-The Crain’s New York Business publication listed Nabeel on its “20 in Their 20’s” list in July of 2020.
-In October of 2020, Lunchbox won the Extraordinary Corporate Employer category of the Diversity in Tech Awards.

Partnerships
-An array of different impactful partnerships since Lunchbox’s inception.

Lunchbox/Pandemic
Lunchbox’s rapidly released innovations created to limit the level of interaction between employees and customers include curbside pickup (which was launched in less than 14 hours due to customer demand), contactless delivery, pocket kiosk, digital menu, and the utilization of cloud kitchens.

Help Main Street
To date, it has helped raise over $516,000 for local businesses, through its team that is compiled 100% of volunteers.

Series A
Lunchbox plans to use the $20M to scale growth nationally to serve the restaurant industry’s need for efficient and revenue-driven solutions to sustain the current economic depression. It will also focus on acquiring top-tier talent and invest in further development on its platform and expand to new markets.

Data points
-Projected 2020 revenue: $1.55MM+ (6x growth from year before)
-Since its inception a year ago, Lunchbox has had 746% YOY growth
-76% of our clients launch a second product within 30-45 days of their first launch

Awards
-The Crain’s New York Business publication award was for Nabeel’s leadership at a young age, and he was joined by several other young leaders who have made an impact in the NY business landscape over the past year.
-The Diversity in Tech Awards celebrates those who are championing the nationwide movement to increase diversity across the technology industry.

Partnerships

Significant partnerships include Odermark, BEAM Impact, Sodexo and Kiwibot, and C3. All details are linked in the next section.