Personalized wine? This Milwaukee company just raised $8.5 million to prove it’s the future –
Summary
Despite the whimsical approach, Bright Cellars founders Richard Yau and Joe Laurendi insist the data they’re collecting is valuable, and not just potentially for winemakers. Bright Cellars’s seed investor, the Milwaukee-based venture firm CSA Partners, which has a range of consumer-facing companies in its portfolio, also joined the round. Yau, a native of San Francisco, says he never expected to live in Milwaukee, but after Bright Cellars was admitted in its earliest days to a local, three-month accelerator program called gener8tor, he and Laurendi decided to stay put. “It’s definitely a smaller entrepreneurial community, but the founders here are very passionate and very supportive and in a larger ecosystem, we might not be connected to all the pieces here that make it work.” That Yau and Laurendi were roommates at MIT is a nice twist, too. Indeed, though they once worked on a parking app at a school hackathon, it was during a wine studies course that Yau attended at neighboring Boston University that the idea for Bright Cellars was born.
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