Lula brings mom-and-pop stores into the online delivery age

When the pandemic hit, Adit Gupta didn’t expect it would be so hard to help his parents add an online component to their New Jersey convenience store.

Gupta, a Drexel University graduate student in computer science at the time, realized that for small retail business owners, getting set up with ecommerce was a barrier to 21st-century business growth, with so many consumer delivery apps and expectations.

“Customers expect you to have a website and an app,” Gupta told Technical.ly. “They expect you to show up on Uber Eats and DoorDash and Grubhub.” 

Gupta found no existing platform to help business owners cover all of the bases. So he and cofounder Tom Falzani decided to create one.

Gupta and Falzani’s startup, Lula Commerce, provides a platform for small retailers to offer online shopping and delivery to their customers using popular apps like DoorDash, UberEats and GrubHub, making it easy for their customers to do business with them online. 

With Lula, stores that may not have the resources to hire their own team of developers can have a site that integrates multiple ecommerce channels, direct customer service, inventory and returns. In the four years since its founding, the company has rapidly expanded to serve thousands of locations across 44 states.

A pandemic-era need turned everyday small business necessity

Though he fell into small business ecommerce by accident, Gupta was always a part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Drexel, where he just recently completed his doctorate in philosophy with a focus on AI.

It can take months for a small retailer to establish itself online, from connecting with all of the delivery channels to managing website ecommerce. Clients who sign up with Lula get a website with an AI voice agent that can take secure orders over the phone and analytics to track everything.

“It connects your inventory to every single way a shopper might want to order your inventory,” Gupta said. 

As Lula has moved to work with retail chains, it has taken some inspiration from Falzani’s onetime employer, Wawa — a big company that has had its own branded website and app for years, which have evolved with technology.

“We enable that Wawa type of outcome at a small fraction of the cost and a small fraction of the time, and democratize enterprise technology for every retailer so that they can turn on their ecommerce experience,” said Gupta.

Orders, whether they come from DoorDash, GrubHub or a business’s own website, go into Lula’s centralized platform, called Lula Hub, which keeps track of inventory and consolidates the financial reporting, so all ecommerce is managed in one place.

Every day, about 1,000 locations use Lula, Gupta said, and the number is growing.

A slow start that paid off

Convincing small businesses in 2021 that they needed what Gupta and Falzani were offering wasn’t always easy.

“We know that ecommerce is how consumers will shop in the future, and they are even shopping primarily through ecommerce now,” said Gupta. “But having an ecommerce portal to your store [today] is like saying in 1997, ‘hey, I have a company — maybe I should build a website?’”

In the early days, Gupta and Falzani went door-to-door, walking into stores in South Philly, trying to convince store operators to pay them $50 to try online sales. 

It took a year to get 10 stores. 

As it grew, Lula was accepted into the SOSV Food-X accelerator in New York, leading to its first round of funding. Other early supporters included Chuck Sacco from Drexel’s Close School of Entrepreneurship, Mel Baiada of Drexel’s Baiada Incubator and Dean Miller of Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies.

“We ended up using that money to grow from like 10 to 30 stores, and we ended up raising a pre-seed round of friends and family and colleagues,” Gupta said. “Cumulatively, we ended up raising a little more than half a million to build this vision.” 

It became a full-time job — plus jobs for a team of between three and four other developers. By the time Lula was a year and a half old, it had about 100 stores and in 2022, it had its first big venture capital round at $6.5 million (per Pitchbook), having proved that the platform met a need. 

“The phase that we’re in now is like, we know this works,” Gupta said. “Now we’re in the continuing to scale phase, but also, we continue to evaluate how the world is changing with AI.” 

AI, he said, can help small businesses grow by taking necessary tasks that they don’t want to do — things like filling out paperwork for refunds — and help automate them, saving them time that they can use to better focus on other parts of the business.

The next goal, Gupta said, is to reach 10,000 stores, a milestone he thinks they can reach within the next few years.

“I think of our impact through two measures,” Gupta said. “How many customers are we serving, and how much are we serving each customer?”