We are excited to announce our investment in Preemadonna, an emerging consumer lifestyle brand and the company behind the Nailbot, a robotic manicurist which uses a smartphone camera to print full color art on nails in seconds. The Nailbot uses Bluetooth to decorate each nail with only a swipe. Artwork from a smartphone—think photos, emojis, logos, or a custom design—can be rendered into nail art through Nailbot’s inkjet-based technology, which combines the phone’s camera, machine vision and other technologies.
We’re pleased to be participating in this current round alongside Halogen Ventures, SOSV, Draper Fisher Jurvetson co-founder Tim Draper and prominent angel investors. Our journey with the company began in the fall of 2014 when we first met Co-founder, CEO and “lead Preemadonna” Pree Walia. For the next few years we tracked the Company’s progress, including its successful turn at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2015, its inclusion as one of only five companies admitted to an accelerator program created via a joint venture between Founders Factory and beauty juggernaut L’Oreal, and at a myriad of other events where the Nailbot was an instant favorite despite a heady field of competitive consumer hardware offerings. At every turn, we have consistently been impressed by the team’s grit, tenacity and vision in taking Preemadonna from raw concept to a company that is now poised to become a leading lifestyle consumer brand with a specific focus on young women.
At Catapult, we found Preemadonna an attractive investment on a variety of dimensions. The Catapult team has a long history of success investing in disruptive ecommerce companies and consumer brands competing in the lifestyle and beauty category, most notably Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever for $1Bn), Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.5Bn) and Madison Reed, a leading subscription ecommerce company focused on women’s hair color and haircare, using chemical-free, fragrance-free and sustainably sourced products. While these companies differ in many ways, the commonality across them was their focus on enormous markets that had seen little innovation in decades; that were rife with channel conflicts and inhabited by complacent incumbents; and, where there existed few technology-enabled solutions. Our thesis behind the investment in Preemadonna was a direct distillation of our experience as investors in DSC, Jet and Madison Reed and our recognition that the nailcare category was another enormous market that was both ripe for a disruptive technology-enabled solution and where a new brand entrant that could build community and fierce loyalty among young women could spur real innovation in the category and delight users. Finally, Preemadonna aligned well with the Catapult brand, culture, how we think about supporting female founding teams (Pree’s co-founder is hardware engineer Casey Schultz), our proclivity for startups tackling relatively overlooked but large markets, our desire to invest in robotics companies focused on the consumer space, and our desire to support mission-driven startup teams that adhere to common goals of diversity and inclusion and are focused on building companies that can achieve global scale.
Yes, Preemadonna is tackling an enormous market opportunity in the nailcare segment. That’s axiomatic. Yet, it doesn’t stop there. The founders have a broader vision of empowering young women and girls by creating technology that nurtures self-expression and originality while simultaneously spear-heading a technology movement in the beauty and lifestyle category. We’re excited to join Pree and the Preemadonna team on this journey. We think there is a great deal of white space ahead and we feel Pree and Casey are the right startup team to coax Preemadonna into its fullest expression.