Print a custom T-shirt, on demand, in five minutes.
That’s what visitors can now do at Downtown Disney, thanks to Costa Mesa-based Inklocker LLC. The startup evolved out of a bricks-and-mortar apparel print shop that Inklocker founder and Chief Executive Brandon Sowers ran with his wife, Elaina. The challenges of managing the shop’s workflow inspired him to create software to streamline the process. The software has now been integrated into printers at more than 30 print shops across the country, allowing them to offer print-on-demand services to their customers, he said.
AnaJet, a manufacturer of garment printers with locations in Costa Mesa and Tustin, took notice last year, hiring Inklocker to install a customer service print shop in its manufacturing facility. That enabled AnaJet to help print shops with maintenance, repair and upgrades of their printers and let it continue to fulfill those print shops’ orders with Inklocker’s software. AnaJet was recently acquired by Japan-based Ricoh Company Ltd., which asked Sowers to serve on its customer advisory board.
While efficiency and cost savings were the original goals for Inklocker’s software, the team came to the conclusion last year that smaller print shop owners simply needed more steady work, Sowers said. Since then, Inklocker has been focused on creating technology to deliver print jobs on a daily basis to every shop that uses its software. One way Inklocker does this is by connecting with online marketplaces, such as Shopify. Online apparel stores on Shopify can now get orders fulfilled where their customers are located. For example, online Australian customers of a California apparel line used to wait weeks for their orders. Now they wait a few days because, behind the scenes, Inklocker routes the print job to an Australian print shop near the customer. Over the next few months, Inklocker will be integrating with other marketplaces due to high demand for this service, Sowers said.
Inklocker’s proof-of-concept at Downtown Disney was created in partnership with Ricoh. Located at the kiosk operated by Elaina Sower’s apparel brand, California Limited, the small print shop allows anyone of any age to pick a shirt, choose a design from the California Limited brand, and print their own T-shirt. Once the shirt is printed, the design is cured with heat to ensure that it will last for “a lifetime of washes,” Brandon Sowers said.
Currently preparing for a seed round of funding, Inklocker has received undisclosed investments from Newport Beach-based early-stage venture fund K5 Ventures, Newport Beach-based Connexus Equity Management Partners, San Francisco-based Right Side Capital Management, members of Irvine-based Tech Coast Angels, and a handful of private angel investors, according to Sowers. He gave no revenue figures but said sales have increased by double digits every month.
Piggybacking on Facebook
An Irvine company that develops technology to cut costs associated with applications for big data—amounts of information so large or complex that they overwhelm traditional data-processing applications—is building on a technology originally developed by Facebook.
RocksDB is a database technology that was introduced by Facebook to enable fast access to billions of small bits of data. The original version has been “open-sourced,” which means it’s been released to the general public, and now has a fast-growing community of thousands of users, such as corporate IT professionals. Irvine-based Levyx Inc.’s software enhancement works in any RocksDB installation and allows RocksDB users to use the same applications, but run them 15 times faster, according to Reza Sadri, Levyx co-founder and chief executive. That’s due to the way that Levyx indexes and accesses the data, Sadri said. It also can save large corporations millions of dollars in IT infrastructure expenses, since it will enable them to use far less equipment to process large-scale workloads, he added.
Levyx has previously enhanced other open-source platforms and released similar products for Apache Spark and Memcached, among others, Sadri said.
In April 2016, Levyx closed on a $5.4 million Series A funding. It’s quadrupled in size since mid-2015 from six employees to more than 25, Chief Operating Officer Luis Morales said. It’s eyeing a larger financing round later this year, he added. The company has representatives in the Midwest, the East Coast, Japan and Germany.
Sadri co-founded Levyx in 2013 with Tony Givargis, a professor of computer science at the University of California-Irvine.
Investment Firm Goes for Tequila
A company that makes tequila is the latest recipient of an investment by Irvine-based Ergo Capital. The investment company was founded by Peter Polydor, who serves as chief executive. He also owns the Eureka co-working building in Irvine. Tequila Tromba, with offices in New York City, Toronto and Guadalajara, received an investment, which founder and Chief Executive Eric Brass declined to disclose.
Brass and three other founders launched the tequila company in 2011 in Toronto. One of the other founders is Marco Cedano, who serves as the company’s master distiller. He was the original master distiller of Don Julio—a tequila brand that’s been around for more than 70 years. Cedano has been working in the tequila industry for 35.
Ergo Capital’s investment will help the company do business and raise more capital in California, Brass said. Tequila Tromba raised under $5 million before Ergo’s investment, he added.
