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Food Tech

Juicero

Shut down · 2017

$400 Wi-Fi-connected juicer that became a national punchline after journalists showed its proprietary juice packets could be squeezed by hand just as effectively.

San Francisco, USA2013–2017

Key metrics

$120M

Total funding

1

Funding rounds

Outcome

Shut down

Operations ended in 2017.

2017

The Story

Founded

Series A–C (cumulative)

$120M

Shut down

What worked

Juicero convinced two of Silicon Valley's most selective venture firms, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, to back a consumer hardware bet at a $120 million scale — a genuine achievement of storytelling and fundraising, built around a real, if ultimately overengineered, piece of precision hardware and a produce-supply-chain business behind it.

What didn't work

  1. 01

    In April 2017, Bloomberg published a story showing that Juicero's proprietary produce packets

    The entire reason the $400 (later $399) Wi-Fi-connected press existed — could be squeezed by hand nearly as effectively and considerably faster than by the machine itself, instantly undermining the product's core value proposition and turning Juicero into a national symbol of Silicon Valley excess.

  2. 02

    Despite having raised $120 million

  3. 03

    The company could not recover

    From the reputational damage or reposition the product credibly, and on September 1, 2017 it announced it was ceasing sales, repurchasing juicers from customers, and shopping the company's remaining assets.

  4. 04

    It was fully defunct by December 2017.

No Product-Market FitOverhypeExecution Flaws

THE VENTURE TRAIL TAKE

A premium hardware product's whole value proposition can evaporate the moment someone demonstrates its core mechanism was unnecessary — no amount of funding recovers from that kind of viral proof.

Read the full postmortem

Company details

Business model
Hardware + Subscription
Founded
2013
Headquarters
San Francisco, USA
Funding rounds
1
Investors
Google Ventures · Kleiner Perkins

Founder

Doug Evans
Founder & CEO; previously founded Organic Avenue, a cold-pressed juice bar chain, in 2002

Sources

  1. 01CNBCThe tech start-up that made a $700 juicing machine has shut down
  2. 02FortuneJuicero: The Maker of the Infamous $400 Juicer Is Shutting Down
  3. 03TechCrunchRIP Juicero, the $400 venture-backed juice machine

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