Welcoming TipX to the Genesis Portfolio
On behalf of Genesis, I’m excited to announce our investment in TipX. TipX is empowering service employees through a cashless, web-based tipping and service review platform, starting with hospitality and retail workers.
— Anuj Jajoo (Venture Partner), Ayomide Akosile, Anirudh Sudarshan, Sunny Wang
The Problem
“Customer is king” has become an industry standard pioneered by giants like Amazon, Chick-fil-A, and Starbucks, but customer service employees themselves are still commodified and unable to build independent career credibility and mobility. After COVID, these employees have become even more valuable but harder to differentiate, reward, and attract. Demand for good service has skyrocketed but stayed unmatched due to the erosion of compensation opportunity (prev. cash-based tipping) and career mobility.
Service employees can outperform and earn through tips in food and travel where PoS systems, tip-sharing, and other common practices exist. However in key service industries like hospitality and retail, this same ecosystem is nonexistent. Employees are locked into subjective reviews and hiring flows if they want to move jobs with credibility, employers are generally ill-equipped to track, coach, and reward service employees, and customers have high tipping friction due to a behavioral shift from physical cash and lack of tipping alternatives. TipX hopes to change this.
The Founders
TipX was founded by Amaan Dosani (BBA McCombs ’22) and Numan Dharani (BBA Emory ‘17), two childhood friends and business partners who grew up around the hospitality industry and have additional experiences across customer service, consumer products, and investment banking. The team saw how rapidly hiring and working environments across hospitality employees changed through the physical and economic constraints of COVID and have been building out the TipX vision since early 2021.
Amaan Dosani — CEO, Co-founder — Amaan is a senior at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business studying management. He previously interned across growth and operations roles in tech/retail at Rex, Dive Chat, Ford, and Aggieland Outfitters. He leads TipX’s product development, strategy, marketing, and operations.
Numan Dharani — CFO, Co-founder — Numan is a ’17 graduate of Emory University, where he studied finance and interned across insurance and capital management. He previously worked in boutique investment banking in Atlanta and helps run a travel center in Texas. He leads TipX’s business development, strategy, and fundraising.
How’re They Doing?
Team TipX has been ramping up operations through this past summer after recently completing the Longhorn Startup Lab Spring 2021 accelerator. They launched with their beta MVP to clients across Texas including Hilton Doubletree Austin and Aggieland Outfitters in College Station and have processed 200+ transactions. As operations scale, the team is actively recruiting for founding-level roles, including engineers to champion and upgrade platform development. If interested, you can reach out and stay up to date on their website and Linkedin.
Why I Led This Deal by Anuj Jajoo, Venture Partner
TipX is bringing frictionless tools and career mobility to some of the most important workers of our economy — service employees, in a rare way that benefits all stakeholders — employees, employers, and customers. At its core, the company offers a cashless tipping solution that is required in the post-COVID world, but, it also offers an employee review and management platform that enables the creation of both service resumes and the collection of high-quality and personalized customer data. This platform play is a unique approach to an extremely nascent and fragmented customer service market. The founding team is also incredibly sincere, driven, and empathetic, bringing a unique ability to drive new technology and still appeal to the wide range of stakeholders across the hospitality industry. The TipX founders are some of the most scrappy and determined I’ve met, and I can’t wait to see them technologize and elevate the customer service experience.
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Genesis is UT Austin’s startup fund, where Anuj is a Venture Partner and Ventures lead.
