Luca, a startup building price planning and prediction tools for retailers, today announced that it closed a $2.5 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Y Combinator (Luca was in Y Combinator’s winter 2023 class), Soma Capital and angel investors.
Luca was co-founded by Tanvi Surti and Yonah Mann, who worked together on Uber’s dynamic pricing team. Mann was focused on Uber Eats pricing, while Surti led the UberPool pricing group.
“During my time on the Pool team in 2019, the business had bad unit economics,” Mann told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Uber was on the verge of an IPO, and I was responsible for getting the unit economics working by reconfiguring Uber Pool’s pricing algorithm. In ten months, we succeeded in plugging a massive hole in Uber’s profit and loss using pricing tech. That got us thinking.”
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