When Justin Kosmides co-founded Bloom in 2023, the goal was to create a "savior" for the transportation industry. He observed that many electric bicycle and electric scooter companies failed because they were unable—or unwilling—to outsource the most challenging tasks such as logistics, manufacturing, and supply chain management. He hopes to convince those survivors and new entrants to leave these tasks to Bloom to handle.

Subsequently, Donald Trump was re-elected and began to impose tariffs in a "scattered" manner on dozens of countries, with part of the aim being to boost American manufacturing. This accelerated the already surging wave of hardware entrepreneurship in the United States. Suddenly, it was no longer just transportation companies seeking to strengthen their domestic supply chains; robotics startups, drone manufacturers, and many other enterprises began to emerge.

This presented an opportunity for Bloom, which is headquartered in Detroit, but to seize this opportunity, the startup had to reinvent itself to some extent. Bloom no longer undertakes some of the complex behind-the-scenes tasks planned initially; instead, it has shifted to a pure market platform model that connects buyers and sellers. Today, its focus is essentially on building a supply chain AI agency for customers to use in finding specific types of suppliers, parts, or manufacturing and engineering services.

This reshaping process has slowed down the financing progress of Bloom. However, the company has now completed over 2,000 matchmaking arrangements for more than 140 companies and hopes to accelerate its growth. Kosmides stated in an interview earlier this year that his startup is like a driver version of China's Alibaba, which has created a contract manufacturing market in China.

Investors have finally started to buy in. On Wednesday, Bloom announced the completion of a $3.6 million seed round of financing, led by the investment firm SNAK Venture Partners which focuses on market platforms. Other investors included Flyover Capital (an early-stage investment firm focusing on the "Flyover State" region) as well as the technology company Mana Ventures. Local investors were also involved, such as Detroit Venture Partners, Invest Detroit Ventures, and Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund.

Kosmides seemed to be overjoyed during the interview, saying that he was "very happy to finally not have to worry about financing anymore and can go back to working on the product."

Refuse first, then accept.

SNAK first came into contact with Bloom last April, which was in the early stages of this reshaping process. In fact, there was even pre-seed who had previously abandoned investing in this startup company.

In a blog post, the organization wrote: “We liked the founder and this argument, but we still decided to give up: we want to see more progress.”

Bloom has been in contact with SNAK throughout the process of transforming into a more software-oriented startup. By May of this year, Bloom had generated revenue equivalent to that of the entire year of 2025 in just 5 months. SNAK also stated that the number of members on their platform has increased by five times, "and the churn rate is very low," which means that there are few customers who cancel their service.

"This is intended to reiterate that, for us, giving up on the pre-seed round does not always mean giving up forever. We are fortunate to have a highly focused investment logic that allows us to continuously follow a small number of interesting early-stage companies and build relationships over time," the institution wrote.

Kosmides indicates that for startups like Bloom, the current financing environment is somewhat brutal. In a world where leading AI models are continuously improving, proving one's value to investors is a difficult uphill battle.

He said, “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find people who are truly willing to write term sheet, rather than just following the trend. We are in such a new phase where everyone is trying to figure out what is real and what is not, and what they should invest in.”

Kosmides said that Bloom has also come into contact with other term sheet. However, SNAK, founded by a long-time executive in the retail industry Sonia Nagar, is "the kind of person you would want on your side," and can help "create a market platform that has the potential to define a category, serving transportation, drones, and all these hardware fields."

Matchmaking and Discovery

The platform of Bloom serves both parties in a supplier relationship. Some customers post contract opportunities on the platform, while others bid for these opportunities. Bloom handles quotations, bookings, and payments on the platform, and currently also assists companies in matching suppliers that can provide contract manufacturing, assembly, design and engineering, freight shipping, warehousing, maintenance, and even hazardous goods transportation services.

Kosmides said, "Our friends, such as the parts market platforms Fictiv, Xometry, MacroFab, etc., are indeed very good 'old-generation' market platforms, suitable for finding a specific part. But when you are a XYZ drone company, or an electric motorcycle company, and you need to find a supplier that meets all these requirements and allows them to bid for this business, it is much more complicated than just finding a CNC part."

Making this system operate efficiently is a key part of Bloom's effort to reshape its business, which requires the collection of large amounts of data from each supplier on the platform. A lot of this data is public—such as how a company describes itself on its own website. However, Kosmides says that approximately 30% to 40% of the data comes directly from these companies. Coupled with the data generated by startups as they acquire more customers and complete more matchmaking processes, Bloom gains an advantage from this, he says.

“You can build the most crazy data scraping models, but you’ll never achieve that level of accuracy,” he said. “We started with a manual booking service, and then as we built a network of suppliers and completed more and more transactions, we gradually improved it layer by layer, so it’s only getting better and better.”

Kosmides believes that this is a better way to establish supplier relationships and can also make it easier for startups to get off the ground. However, he also thinks that the platform of Bloom will create opportunities for small manufacturers that do not have large marketing budgets or sales teams.

For example, he mentioned that a contract manufacturer in Michigan used to take on miscellaneous jobs before collaborating with Bloom. These tasks included refurbishing Nest thermostats and Bird scooters, as well as creating display units for Chick-fil-A. Nowadays, the company is bidding for contracts related to drone assembly.

"I believe that the ability to discover and the ability to match opportunities are precisely what American manufacturing truly lacks," he said. "These capabilities simply do not exist at the level of digitization."