JUUCE

Power phones, fuel brands

September 15th, 2025

We all know that feeling. You’re just now heading into a long day without a phone charger, and you notice your battery is already at 50%. But JUUCE is thinking big. What if you also turned those stations into an ad network? Rentable phone chargers FTW.

First order of business: congrats to the Trag team on their recent acquisition by Aikido Security! We covered their pre-seed round at the beginning of this year.

Second, a final call: we’re hosting two events in SF next week:

  • Tuesday, Sept 23: Seed+ Founder Dinner. We’re inviting 20 founders for dinner with our friends at Fidelity Private Shares and Intercom. Our dinners fill up very quickly, so if you’re a seed+ founder who’d like to attend, RSVP ASAP.

  • Wednesday, Sept 24: Fireside with Max Marchione, co-founder of Superpower. Diving into all things zero to one in startups, as well as his thoughts around the future of personal health tech. Open to all!

Arek and Ethan 🦄

JUUCE operates a network of portable phone charging kiosks that also function as digital advertising displays. Each kiosk offers rentable chargers with built-in cables compatible across devices, providing a reliable utility for stadiums, campuses, festivals, malls, and other high-traffic venues. While users charge, the kiosks display programmatic ads they can actively engage with, such as by scanning QR codes, signing up for offers, or downloading apps, enabling real-time engagement and first-party data capture.

Check it out: juuce.me

JUUCE earns revenue through several channels. In one model, it sells kiosks directly to venues, which either charge users or offer free sponsored charging. In another, it sells to distributors, who place stations in venues and share revenue. On top of both, JUUCE adds branded activations and, most importantly, ad sales on kiosk screens, its largest and most scalable stream. Media revenue is shared with venues and ad platforms, where JUUCE keeps a majority share.

  • Raised $145,000 in angel funding in May 2025

  • 500+ kiosks live across 35 U.S. states

  • Exclusive venue deals with MLB teams, Mall of America, 30+ colleges, and festivals including Breakaway Music Festival, We Belong Here, and Oceans Calling Festival

  • 7-figure lifetime revenue and profitable at the kiosk level

  • Targeting next round of funding in about 12 months

In December 2021, JUUCE’s eventual founder and CEO David Greenfield was visiting his friend (and future CFO) Jake Taub for SantaCon. After the event, with both of their phones out of battery, they were left stranded and mugged. The experience led Greenfield to believe charging your phone should be as easy as finding an ATM. The next day, he began brainstorming what would become JUUCE.

Greenfield, a University of Maryland alum with experience as a consultant at IBM and a customer experience specialist at Tesla, brought the operational and partnership focus. Taub, also a Maryland graduate and former Morgan Stanley analyst who promoted shows at Echostage, the highest-ranked EDM club in the U.S., blended finance with an understanding of live events. They were soon joined by Daniel Kramer, a former executive recruiter with deep venue connections, who stepped in as COO. Together, the team took JUUCE from its first kiosk at the University of Maryland to a growing network of stadiums, campuses, and festivals across the country.

JUUCE has the potential to become a category-defining company in interactive out-of-home advertising. Traditional OOH ads, such as billboards, static signage, and stadium placements, are built for awareness, not engagement. JUUCE flips that model by embedding its media in a service people actually need. It expands charging beyond an amenity and into a point of interaction. This creates a rare bridge between utility and marketing, offering measurability more like internet advertising than traditional OOH. JUUCE enables targeted advertising that brings digital-style accountability into the physical world.

A JUUCE charging station.

One JUUCE kiosk can serve hundreds of users and generate around 200,000 monthly impressions. With CPMs, or cost per mile/thousand impressions, around $5, this translates to over $1,000 in gross media revenue per unit per month, with strong margins even after revenue splits. Add on charging fees, branded wraps, and sponsorships, and the payback period on each kiosk is short. Now, scale that to the 10,000 units JUUCE is targeting, and you’re looking at a $100 million+ ARR business with defensibility rooted in venue exclusivity and first-party data.

Experiential advertising is a $128 billion market, growing at nearly 10% annually. Brands are shifting budgets toward interactive, context-rich placements, while CMOs increasingly expect “CFO-grade” metrics like incrementality and ROAS as they look for stronger guarantees of a return on ad spend. JUUCE’s ability to capture emails, trigger app downloads on the spot, and later reach the same users again through mobile advertising IDs positions it well for this shift. Whereas competitors emphasize either sponsorships or utility, JUUCE integrates both with scalable media and adtech.

The biggest risks lie in execution: keeping kiosks powered and online at scale, and balancing the ups and downs of programmatic ad demand with steady direct sponsorships. Privacy and data policies are also evolving, which could affect retargeting strategies. But the founding team has already demonstrated capital efficiency, traction across 500+ live kiosks, and exclusive deals with marquee venues. If they continue to expand thoughtfully, JUUCE will grow into a staple interactive media network.