- Company — Sprig
- Sector — Food delivery / vertically integrated restaurant
- Founded / Died — 2013 / 26 May 2017
- Lifespan — ~4 years
- Capital raised — ~$56.7M (Greylock, Social Capital, Battery Ventures)
- Peak scale — Operated in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Chicago; revenue never disclosed. Headcount in the hundreds including kitchen staff and couriers.
- What it built — On-demand delivery of freshly cooked meals from its own kitchens, promising delivery in under 15 minutes.
- Stated cause of death — CEO Gagan Biyani wrote that "the demands of the business exceeded our resources" and that the vertically integrated model — owning kitchens, employing chefs and couriers — was "costly and complex" (TechCrunch).
- Evidenced cause — Stated and evidenced causes agree, unusually. Biyani's own later writing is even more direct: the model required high order density in narrow geographies and a fixed cost base (kitchens, W-2 staff) that did not flex with demand.
- Warning signs visible earlier — Contribution margin per order was negative or marginal from launch and remained so through multiple price and menu changes. The 15-minute promise forced kitchen capacity to be sized for peak, not average.
- Money outcome — Investors lost ~$57M. Employees laid off. Biyani co-founded Maven (cohort-based courses) and is candid publicly about Sprig.
- Post-mortem quality — Good. Biyani has repeatedly and specifically analysed the failure in interviews and essays, naming the fixed-cost structure rather than the market.
- Transferable lesson — Vertical integration converts variable costs into fixed costs. That is a good trade only if you are certain of demand density.
- Sources — TechCrunch · Fortune · SFGate
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