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Rosen, who formed the full-service storage company early in 2013 after learning an expensive lesson from Superstorm Sandy.
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Sam Rosen, co-founder and CEO of MakeSpace, which he describes as a next generation full-service storage company has recently succeeded in raising $8 million in Series-A funding.
The latest round of funding comes hot on the heels of the $1.3 million seed capital conscripted in the Autumn of last year to get his innovative project off the ground.
Signs that Sam is heading very much in the right direction with MakeSpace is that most of the latest capital injection is coming from the same investors who provided the original seed capital, with a few names and faces also participating.
Investors at MakeSpace were led by Upfront Ventures with Ricky Van Veen and Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk also taking part, while the new round of funding also brought in Founders Fund and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
Sam Rosen admits that his inspiration came to found MakeSpace following the days of bedlam after Superstorm Sandy devastated the East Coast of the United States in October 2012, causing horrific damage including extensive flooding. Sam’s girlfriend’s who lived in Hoboken, New Jersey had her apartment flooded and he found himself in the frustrating position of having to move all of her remaining belongings that remained above the water line out of the apartment and into some form of temporary storage facility.
Sam was horrified to discover that, even taking into account the exceptional circumstances, there was no infrastructure in place to uplift goods to take into storage, but also that there were very few, if any self storage facilities on the East Coast that offered a cost effective solution for customers that wanted to store just a few items. Anyone wanting storage had to rent a unit of a minimum size, which could prove expensive.
Out of the chaos of Superstorm Sandy, the concept behind MakeSpace began to form in Sam’s mind and he rapidly put his idea into action. Along with co-founders Rahul Gandhi and Adam LeVasseur, MakeSpace, which they describe as the physical equivalent of “a Dropbox for real-life storage” – a next generation full-service storage company, began to get underway.
First of all people who use the company’s services no longer have to deal with the logistics of transporting their possession to a self storage facility, instead all they have to do is pack them into specially designed plastic bins, dropped off at least a day in advance by one of MakeSpace’s outstanding Green Mercedes MakeSpace trucks.
Once the goods are packed, and inventoried by the driver and the customer, they are transported to MakeSpace secure storage facility with the inventory uploaded to the company’s website where the customer can rapidly access the details, and if and when the customer wants some or all of their goods back, a simple request via the MakeSpace web site is all that is required.
And compared to the cost of a traditional storage bin, which averages around $50, MakeSpace’s pickup, storage and delivery costs $25 a month, for a maximum of to four large plastic, stored long-term at the company’s Jersey City facility. Additional bins cost $6.25 a month.
An added service that MakeSpace customers can take advantage of is having the contents of their bins photographed, with each image having its own catalogue number. This facility allows customers the rapid and easy option of having a single item or items taken out of storage, either temporarily or permanently and delivered to their home for a flat fee of less than $30., a service which according Rosen 99.99% of their customers have opted for.
Thanks to the latest round of funding, will allow Sam and his partners to increase their fleet of vehicles, spread their areas of activity as well as perfecting the information technology on which the company is based and has achieved remarkable results till now.
While Sam Rosen, like the ten of millions of New Yorkers and all the other East Coast cities never want to see another Superstorm Sandy, or anything that even approaches its proportion, from that particular catastrophic event came at least one initiative that will make the life easier for a lot of people in the future.
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