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XEcommerce Platform BloomNation Helped Small Florists Grow. Now It's Going After Liquor Stores and Pizzerias
Breanna de Vera is dot.LA's editorial intern. She is currently a senior at the University of Southern California, studying journalism and English literature. She previously reported for the campus publications The Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media.

BloomNation wants to do for liquor stores what it did for flower delivery, but with robots.
A platform for local florists to sell arrangements to customers, BloomNation has been booming during the pandemic as video weddings and at-home birthdays have become the norm. Flower orders have soared as stay-at-home guidelines have bolstered the need for delivery services.
The Santa Monica-based company wants to grow on that success. It is rebranding itself as a platform provider for small businesses called Promenade, and debuting a new site called Dig-In for pizzerias, and another called Swigg for liquor stores. It's also just partnered with Tortoise, a San Francisco-based company that produces autonomous delivery robots, to roll out robotic flower delivery.
"One of our anti-goals is to be like a Shopify or Squarespace, where it's like everything for everyone," said Farbod Shoraka, BloomNation founder and chief executive. "We're getting our hands dirty in each category, and working on specific solutions for that vertical."
BloomNation provides the software for florists to advertise their own arrangements online and it helps with the delivery, coordinating logistics for over 3,000 local florists in the U.S. Though Shoraka declined to share the company's revenue, he said it is growing "at a 100% clip, year over year."
"Now more than ever, people recognize the value of a small business and how it's the backbone of the economy," said Shoraka. "And so there's a movement towards investing in, not only ecommerce companies, but companies that are also supporting small businesses."
BloomNation co-founders Gregg Weisstein (left) and Farbod Shoraka.
Their rebrand comes as the company announces it's closed an $11 million Series B round led by Los Angeles-based B. Riley Venture Capital.
BloomNation sells itself to local florists by offering them more control over their designs and process than its competitors like Teleflora and 1-800-Flowers, which have been around for decades. Those companies offer standardized bouquet designs on their site; local florists fill the customer orders and the company handles delivery.
"Those companies were putting a lot of pressure on the florists," said Shoraka, "[They] forced florists to take a product image that was on Teleflora.com, and make it look exactly like that for very little money... it didn't really make them feel like artists."
Other competitors, including floral startups like The Bouqs Co. and Urban Stems, cut out local florists. They source their flowers from local farmers and handle the arrangements and delivery themselves.
Part of the inspiration for BloomNation was Shoraka's aunt, a florist in Irvine. She was having difficulty connecting with customers online, and brokers like Teleflora were putting pressure on her to create standardized bouquets that squashed the creative process entirely. Customers also were not returning to her shop, because the online broker sources from a variety of shops without telling customers which florist made their arrangement. The steep broker fees and lack of customer loyalty left Shoraka's aunt struggling, he said.
Shoraka, a former investment banker, consultant Gregg Weisstein and World Series of Poker champion David Daneshgar founded BloomNation in 2011. When they realized they would need a good amount of funding to launch a company, Daneshgar entered a poker competition, winning $30,000, which the company used as its seed funding.
With the close of this Series B round, the company has raised $18.2 million total. Its current investors include Andreessen Horowitz, A. Capital Ventures, Spark Capital and Chicago Ventures. Sharoka shared that most of the funding would go to expanding their team, particularly in engineering and product management to further develop the two new platforms.
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Breanna de Vera is dot.LA's editorial intern. She is currently a senior at the University of Southern California, studying journalism and English literature. She previously reported for the campus publications The Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media.
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Mother Blames TikTok For Daughter’s Death in ‘Blackout Challenge’ Suit
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
The mother of a 10-year-old girl who died after allegedly trying a dangerous online “challenge” has sued Culver City-based TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, claiming the social media app’s algorithm showed her videos of people choking themselves until they pass out.
Nylah Anderson, an intelligent child who already spoke three languages, was “excruciatingly asphyxiated” and found unconscious in her bedroom on Dec. 7, according to a complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Pennsylvania. She spent five days in pediatric intensive care until succumbing to her injuries.
The lawsuit, filed by her mother Tawainna Anderson, claims TikTok’s algorithm had previously shown Nylah videos depicting the “Blackout Challenge,” in which people hold their breath or choke themselves with household items to achieve a euphoric feeling. That encouraged her to try it herself, the lawsuit alleged.
“The TikTok Defendants’ algorithm determined that the deadly Blackout Challenge was well-tailored and likely to be of interest to 10-year-old Nylah Anderson, and she died as a result,” the suit said.
In a previous statement about Nylah’s death, a TikTok spokesperson noted the “disturbing” challenge predates TikTok, pointing to a 2008 warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about deadly choking games. The spokesperson claimed the challenge “has never been a TikTok trend.” The app currently doesn’t produce any search results for “Blackout Challenge” or a related hashtag.
“We remain vigilant in our commitment to user safety and would immediately remove related content if found,” the TikTok statement said. “Our deepest sympathies go out to the family for their tragic loss.”
At least four other children or teens have died after allegedly attempting the Blackout Challenge, according to the Anderson lawsuit. TikTok has grappled with dangerous challenges on its platform before, including one in which people tried to climb a stack of milk crates. That was considered so dangerous that TikTok banned the hashtag associated with it last year. In February, TikTok updated its content rules to combat the dangerous acts and other harmful content.
The Anderson lawsuit comes as lawmakers and state attorneys general scrutinize how TikTok and other social media can be bad for teens and younger users, including by damaging their mental health, causing negative feelings about their body image and making them addicted to the apps.
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Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Netflix Updated Its Culture Memo for the First Time in 5 Years to Address Censorship, Secrecy
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Netflix promised change after its poor first-quarter earnings. One of the first targets: the Netflix Culture document.
The changes, which Variety reported on Thursday, indicate a new focus on fiscal responsibility and concern about censorship. While promises to support honest feedback and open decision-making remain, the memo’s first update in almost five years reveals that the days of lax spending are over. The newly added “artistic expression” section emphasizes Netflix’s refusal to censor its work and implores employees to support the platform’s content.
The “artistic expression” section states that the company will not “censor specific artists or voices” and specifies that employees may have to work on content “they perceive to be harmful.” The memo points to ratings, content warnings and parental controls as ways for users to determine what is appropriate content.
Censorship has been a contentious issue within Netflix. Last year, employees walked out in protest after the company stood by comedian Dave Chappelle’s special, “The Closer,” which many said was transphobic. The streaming service has since announced four more specials from the comedian, who was attacked on stage at Netflix’s first comedy festival. The show will not air on the platform, as Netflix did not tape the event.
The reaction to Chappelle’s 2021 special ripples further in the updated memo. After firing an employee who leaked how much the company paid for the special, the new “ethical expectations” section directs employees to protect company information.
The memo also reflects pressure borught by poor first-quarter earnings. Employees are now instructed to “spend our members’ money wisely,” and Variety reported that earlier passages that indicated a lack of spending limits were cut. Variety also found that the updated memo removed promises that the company would not make employees take pay cuts in the face of Netflix’s own financial struggles.
These updates come as employee morale has reportedly dropped and editorial staffers at the Netflix website TuDum were laid off en masse. Those employees were offered two weeks of severance pay—and Netflix has now cut a section in the memo promising four months of full pay as severance.
As the company that literally wrote the book on corporate culture faces internal struggles, it's unlikely that making employees take on more responsibility while prioritizing corporate secrecy and discouraging content criticism will improve morale.
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
‘Raises’: Mahmee Secures $9.2M, Wave Financial Launches $60M Fund
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
Venture Capital
Mahmee, an integrated care delivery platform for maternal and infant health that connects patients, health professionals, and healthcare organizations to increase access to prenatal and postpartum care, raised a $9.2 million Series A funding round led by Goldman Sachs.
FutureProof Technologies, a climate risk analytics platform, raised $6.5 million in capital led by AXIS Digital Ventures along with Innovation Endeavors and MS&AD Ventures.
Anja Health, a doctor-backed cord blood banking company, raised $4.5 million led by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six.
Funds
Wave Financial LLC, a digital asset investment management company, is launching a $60 million fund to deploy capital via cryptocurrency.
Raises is dot.LA’s weekly feature highlighting venture capital funding news across Southern California’s tech and startup ecosystem. Please send fundraising news to Decerry Donato (decerrydonato@dot.la).
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.