We are a team of engineers
and designers who love tea.
About teaBOT
We believe that there’s a perfect cup of tea for each person and we want to help you find it. We partner with top tea suppliers and farms to provide the best ingredients to allow our customers to create their perfect cup. As a team of engineers and designers, we built a robot for offices and showrooms that want to provide this amazing experience to their staff and guests.
teaBOT allows you to create and order a custom cup of loose-leaf tea at the touch of a button. Tea lovers control every aspect of their tea on the touch screen or their smartphone, including the percentage of each ingredient, the strength and even temperature. Whether trying new flavors, reordering a favorite, or enjoying a friend’s blend, teaBOT guides you in creating a great blend using data from the thousands of blends created using our platform. Our users can also order their custom blend online to enjoy at home. We also share the most popular blends on our website for everyone to enjoy.
How We Started
teaBOT was founded in 2013 by Rehman Merali and Brian Lee to make tea fun and customizable. We began with an idea to make retail tea more convenient, but by 2015 we discovered that providing teaBOT as an amenity allowed tea lovers to get more creative with their blends. This creativity has led to nearly one million cups served in countries across North America and Europe.
In our founding years, teaBOT benefited from several amazing business accelerators, including Rotman’s Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) at the University of Toronto, the MaRS JOLT incubator, the Start@UTIAS program and Y Combinator. In addition, we have benefitted from the tremendous support and investment from some incredible angel investors and institutional investors, including: Ontario Center for Excellence, MaRS IAF, Qualcomm Ventures, Relay Ventures, Cohen Private Ventures, Lofty Ventures, iNovia Capital, Garage VC, and Y Combinator.
Thank you for your continued support! Please let us know where you would like to see teaBOT next.
Leadership
Rehman Merali
Co-Founder and CEO
Rehman has a background in robotics (a PhD in Aerospace Robotics from the University of Toronto and a Mechatronics Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo) that enabled him to build the original teaBOTs and build the team that brought our product to market. Rehman now oversees both product and business development at teaBOT. Although he spends more time on business operations now, he still loves robotics and spends more time than he admits watching machines move.
My Blend: Jas-Mint (A blend of jasmine green and peppermint)
Chris Deutsch
Re-Founder
Chris Deutsch has spent over 20 years starting up, investing in and working with early-stage, venture-backed startups in ecommerce, web and mobile applications, enterprise software, and consumer products. Chris invested in teaBOT in 2015 and has been the company’s biggest fan ever since. Chris has since joined as our Re-Founder to help guide the company’s strategic direction.
My Blend: Peppermint Pat-tea (A blend of cacao shells and peppermint)