The California boba chain an engineer built - fruit-forward drinks, software-grade margins, and a bunny plushie hiding in your cup.
The house style, in one frame. A Coconut Cha Cha Bowl - shredded coconut, watermelon cubes, taro balls, sago - sits in a woven basket beside the UMe mark. It looks styled for a phone camera, because it is.
There is a particular kind of person who looks at a cup of bubble tea and sees, instead of a drink, a system. Jiachun Li - who goes by Summer - is that person. In 2019 she was a mechanical engineer in the auto industry in the San Francisco Bay Area, and bubble tea was a side hustle. One store. Her own savings. A day job still running in parallel, because the responsible thing to do with a risky idea is to keep the paychecks coming while you find out whether the idea works.
The idea worked. That is the short version, and it is worth pausing on how unusual the long version is. Most food-and-beverage startups burn money for years on the theory that scale will eventually rescue the unit economics. UMe Tea did the opposite. It was profitable more or less from the beginning, and it stayed profitable - reinvesting its own cash into new locations - for four straight years before it took a single dollar of outside money. When you build like that, capital stops being a life raft and becomes what it is supposed to be: a multiplier.
The recipe is not sentimental. Rather than sell, in the words of the investment memo, "old-fashioned tapioca milk tea overloaded with sugar," UMe leaned into fruit-based drinks tuned for American palates - lighter, seasonal, sourced from local farms, and shipped at a pace that would exhaust most kitchens. UMe launches two to three new drinks a month. Many competitors launch roughly one a year. Cadence, it turns out, is a moat: while a rival deliberates over a single seasonal flavor, UMe has already run two dozen experiments and knows what its customers actually want.
What its customers actually want is instructive. Roughly 60% of them are not Asian - a striking figure for a category that trades heavily on nostalgia. UMe did not sell nostalgia. It started from the local taste and built backward, importing the operating machinery of China's new-tea brands rather than importing their menus. The drinks are sweet and rich where Americans like sweet and rich. And, tellingly, salted crispy chicken - a snack - now accounts for about 30% of sales at a company with the word "Tea" in its name. UMe leaned in rather than fighting the brand.
Then there is the bunny. UMe hides a surprise plushie in the bottom of the cup; you peel it open to find out which one you got. The mechanic is borrowed from China's blind-box toys and Japan's gashapon machines, and it did exactly what it was designed to do - it turned every customer into a content creator and every drink into a piece of TikTok. Search "Ume" - short for "u & me" - and you get hundreds of young people showing off their haul. The product is the marketing budget.
“Our tea is not only pretty but also fun.”
The engineering shows up where you can't see it. UMe built an automated mixing system that cut barista training from two or three days down to about two hours - which is the unglamorous reason a new store can hit payback in three months and still taste consistent. The reported gross margins, 70-80%, are the kind of numbers people usually associate with software, not with a physical cup of tea and fruit. Founders tend to romanticize the front of house and neglect the back. UMe did the reverse, and the balance sheet reflects it.
By 2025 the side hustle was roughly thirty stores clustered tightly across the Bay Area - about three miles apart, dense by design, dominant in one region before chasing the next. That is when the outside money finally arrived: a $10M Series A led by Conductive Ventures, with early backer iFly.vc and EGP (Mingyu Ventures) following on. The money is going toward the two least glamorous things a growing chain can spend on - team and supply chain - which is roughly what you'd expect from a company run by engineers.
A ~$6.6 drink with a mystery bunny-mascot plushie hidden in the bottom, revealed by peeling the cup open. The blind-box mechanic that fuels UMe's TikTok engine.
Seasonal, lower-sugar fruit recipes sourced from local farms - the lighter alternative UMe was built around.
Brown Sugar Boba, Mochi Black Milk Tea and other classics, tuned richer and sweeter for American palates.
Uji Strawberry Matcha Latte, yogurt-based drinks, slushies and caffeine-free options.
Popcorn chicken, fries and strips. The salted crispy chicken alone is roughly 30% of sales.
Shredded coconut, watermelon cubes, sago, taro balls and coconut milk - a spooned, layered take on the format.
Mechanical engineer Summer Li invests her savings in UMe Tea's first Bay Area store while keeping her day job.
The profitable business reinvests its own cash into new California locations - no outside funding.
UMe launches its surprise bunny-plushie cup, reaches nine profitable stores, and raises a $2.2M seed round from iFly.vc.
New stores planned across Walnut Creek, San Jose, San Mateo and San Francisco as the chain clusters by region.
Conductive Ventures leads a $10M round with iFly.vc and EGP; UMe operates ~30 stores and targets 33.
| Round | Amount | Date | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $2.2M | Jun 2023 | iFly.vc |
| Series A | $10M | 2025 | Conductive Ventures (lead), iFly.vc, EGP (Mingyu Ventures) |
Figures compiled from public reporting (TechCrunch, 36Kr, iFly.vc). Amounts approximate.
UMe Tea skews Gen Z and young millennial - the majority of customers are 18 to 35 - and it was engineered to travel beyond the boba faithful. Around 60% of buyers aren't Asian, which is the whole point of a menu that starts from local taste rather than tradition.
You can order in-store or through UMe's mobile and contactless ordering, which the chain ran from day one. Stores lean into a soft-pink, cherry-blossom, K-pop aesthetic - built, quite deliberately, to be filmed.
The signature cup, opened - hug the Ume bunny. Watch the plushie reveal that fuels the brand's social feed.
Product demos, drops and fan-week reels - the surprise-cup mechanic in motion.
Hundreds of user-generated haul videos - the marketing UMe doesn't have to pay for.