Coral is a company that desires to “simplify the special care space through intelligent automation,” and they have accumulated $4.3 million to get it done.
Their initial goal? An at-home, entirely automated machine for decorating your nails.
How Does Coral Work?
Put a finger in, press down, hold a few seconds and you have got a completely painted and dried nail.
More than once in the discussions, the team indicated to the idea as a “Keurig coffee machine, just for nails.”
It is yet early days for the company.
While they have prepared a working machine, they are pretty clear about it being a prototype.
As such, they are still staying rather hush-hush about the features, refusing to say much about how it works.
They did mention that it paints one finger at a time, using about 10 minutes to go from empty nails to all fingers painted and dried.
To hurry up drying time while guaranteeing a stable paint job, it’ll need Coral’s exclusive nail polish — so don’t assume to be capable of popping open a bottle of nail polish and pouring it in.
Coral’s polish will appear in pods, which the consumer will be able to purchase individually or receive via subscription.
Under the cover are a camera and some exclusive computer vision algorithms, enabling the machine to paint the nail perfectly without needing manual nail cleanup from the user after the fact.
Also yet under wraps — or, more precisely, not defined, however — is the cost.
In The Words of The Co-Founder
While Coral co-founder Ramya Venkateswaran states that she assumes it to be a “premium device,” they have not just yet nailed down a precise price.
Coral’s team is presently made up of eight people — mainly mechanical, chemical, and software engineers.
Both co-founders, meantime, have experiences in hardware; Venkateswaran earlier worked as a product strategy manager at Dolby, where she assisted launch the Dolby Conference Phone.
Her co-founder, Bradley Leong, put about $800,000 on Kickstarter to ship Brydge back in 2012 before he became a partner at the seed-stage investment fund Tandem Capital.
It was while some industrial hardware research there when he discovered “the change that this machine is based on.”
Vankateswaran states that the team has allocated $4.3 million to date from CrossLink Capital, Root Ventures, Tandem Capital, and Y Combinator.
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