Fifteen more stores in Phoenix.
$1,000,000 seed · $10M post-money · Metro Phoenix, Arizona
$1,000,000 seed · $10M post-money · Metro Phoenix, Arizona
Drive-through coffee locations in Arizona today
Nobody has to be convinced that Arizona will buy coffee and breakfast from a drive-through. That question was answered by other people, with their own capital, over the last twenty years. Sixteen stores is one point eight percent of what this state already supports.
Starbucks and Dunkin' counts as of December 2025; Dutch Bros July 2024 and higher today; Black Rock August 2026; 7 Brew September 2026.
Why now
Phoenix is the market they all want. Dutch Bros just bought back its East Valley franchise; 7 Brew's Phoenix developer is coming.
What none of them do
Every brand on the scoreboard above is a beverage business that tolerates food. We built the food in from the first store — so our ticket is roughly double theirs, and we need less than half the cars to make the same money.
| Brand | Drive-through | Craft coffee | Own energy line | Full breakfast food | Made to order, not reheated | Under 3 min at the window |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starbucks | — | |||||
| Dunkin' | — | |||||
| Dutch Bros | — | |||||
| Black Rock Coffee Bar | — | |||||
| 7 Brew | — | — | ||||
| Outcast |
full partial— none
Dope doughnuts and dope sandwiches. Elevated breakfast you would happily eat for lunch — out of a drive-through window.
The brand is the asset. Everything else is evidence.
East Mesa prototype · rendering
What is already open
Three years in Mesa building the concept and dialing in the menu. That shop closed in July 2026 and the drive-through opened in August. Hayden is store one — and every store after it is a repeat of it, not of the shop.
What this round does to it first
Hayden is open and under-marketed. Consistent local marketing is the cheapest revenue in this plan, and it sets the AUV that every one of the next fifteen stores is underwritten against. It is the first line of the use of funds for a reason.
Designed figures, not actuals. Every number on this page traces back to one open store — ask to see it.
The unit
The Scottsdale drive-through at $1.55M of sales, built on the KPI targets TJ already runs the company on. Nothing here requires a capability we do not have.
TJ's targets
Across sixteen
$352Kis the blended store EBITDA across all sixteen, built bottom-up store by store — not assumed.
Dutch Bros does $2M a store on a $7 ticket — call it eight hundred cars a day, nearly all of it before eleven. We do $1.55M on a ticket that carries food, across three dayparts. Fewer cars, bigger ticket — and that is what lets a cheaper corner work.
Hayden at $1.4M earns less. East Mesa at $1.8M earns more. A $1.4M store does not carry a $1.8M store's margin, because labor and overhead are partly fixed — that is volume, not execution, and the blended figure already carries it.
The thing we learned
Metro Phoenix is full of abandoned small-format drive-through boxes — the lane, the window and the pad are already there. Converting one costs a fraction of building one, and it sells nearly the same. It works for us because we do not need a corner that delivers eight hundred cars a day.
Ground-up
2.1 yearsto return the build
Conversion
11 monthsto return the build
Eight of the next eleven stores are conversions. That is what lets $7 million buy eleven stores instead of four — and it is why this plan carries almost no debt.
Both build costs are management estimates. No store has been built on the $300,000 conversion figure, and the $1M ground-up assumes a landlord contribution of the kind being negotiated at East Mesa.
Why this scales
One footprint, drive-through first. Hayden is unit one.
Underwritten before we sign a lease. Conversions first, ground-up where the corner earns it.
A crew is certified, not hired.
Store fifteen makes the same calls as store one, and can prove it.
Built once, run in every store, measured at the ticket.
GMs who have already run the prototype, hired ahead of the opening.
How we build demand
Outcast already has 10,500 followers and 442 posts. The gap was never reach — it was rhythm. Every day has a name, a platform and a person, so nobody has to decide what to make in the morning.
The week
Two audiences, two platforms
And three people who already work here
Dutch Bros runs paid media at under 2% of revenue and puts 73% of transactions through its own channels. Demand in this category is earned, not bought. A six-month daily calendar, the SOP and the budget sit behind this page.
The product
Two of these are things a drive-through coffee brand cannot make, and two are things a doughnut shop cannot pour. One window sells all four, and the ticket carries all four.
Dutch Bros does $2M a store on drinks alone, and is now adding food for a four-point lift. We start where they are trying to get to.
What the million does
A million dollars does not build four stores on its own. It is the equity slice of a stack that also uses sale-leaseback on East Mesa and equipment financing on the conversions — the model carries about $3.2M of that debt at its 2027 peak, repaid in full when the Series A closes.
The sixteen
Open or funded by this round
5
The Series A — East Valley and north
5
The Series A — west and central
6
The original Mesa shop, where the concept was built, closed in July 2026. Hayden is store one. Named markets, not a dot map — sites beyond Gilbert and Queen Creek are the plan, not commitments.
The next round, named now
A growth investor's second question is always what comes after them. Here it is in advance — and unlike most plans, this one only has one more round in it.
Sixteen Arizona stores funded by $8 million of equity and cash the stores generate. Nothing beyond that is priced into this round.
The Series A pre-money is an assumption, not a term sheet. It produces the 20% dilution used throughout; priced higher, the seed does better, not worse.
The arc
| 2026 | 2027 | 2028 | 2029 | 2030 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stores open, end of year | 1 | 5 | 8 | 12 | 16 |
| System revenue | $0.5M | $3.7M | $8.6M | $13.8M | $19.8M |
| Store-level EBITDA | $60K | $554K | $1.6M | $2.9M | $4.3M |
| Corporate G&A | ($342K) | ($786K) | ($1.1M) | ($1.5M) | ($1.8M) |
| Corporate EBITDA | ($431K) | ($832K) | $60K | $809K | $1.9M |
| Net debt | — | $2.7M | net cash | net cash | net cash |
At maturity: $23.8M of system revenue, $5.6M of store EBITDA — $352,000 a store — and $3.9M after corporate overhead.
2026 and 2027 are negative at the corporate line, and that is the plan: four openings in one year carry roughly $600K of pre-opening expense, and corporate is staffed for sixteen stores rather than five. The stores themselves are profitable throughout.
The return
And if nobody buys it: sixteen unlevered stores throw off $3.9 million a year. On 8% that is roughly $314,000 annually — a 31% yield on the original million, indefinitely. The floor here is a distribution, not a zero.
At an 8x multiple the return is 2.5x standalone and 3.6x strategic; at 6x, 1.9x and 2.7x. Nobody buys sixteen stores as a financial buyer, so the strategic column is the base case — but the range is the honest way to read it.
Who buys this
Roark buys at three hundred stores. A sixteen-store Arizona chain with $5.6 million of store-level EBITDA sells to someone smaller and closer — and there are more of them than there are Roarks.
Precedent, not promise. No acquirer has expressed any interest in the company.
The horizon — not in this round
A Series B after Arizona would take the format into three markets the category has already proven. The return above assumes none of this happens — it is underwritten to sixteen Arizona stores and a 2030 exit. This is what we would do instead if the stores keep working.
Phase one · 2026–2030
Arizona
1616 open
This round and the Series A. One metro, every store inside an hour.
Metro Phoenix (16)Mesa · Scottsdale · Gilbert · Queen Creek · Chandler · Tempe · Peoria · Glendale · Buckeye · Arcadia · Surprise · and five more
Phase two · 2031–2032
Nevada + Utah
+1329 open
Adjacent drive markets. Utah has the youngest population in the country.
Las Vegas (6)Henderson · Summerlin · Centennial Hills · North Las Vegas · Southwest · EnterpriseWasatch Front (7)Lehi · American Fork · Orem · Provo · Draper · South Jordan · Layton
Phase three · 2033–2034
Texas
+1241 open
Dallas–Fort Worth first. The only market here big enough to hold the rest.
Dallas–Fort Worth (12)Frisco · Plano · McKinney · Allen · Prosper · Little Elm · Denton · Flower Mound · Southlake · Arlington · Mansfield · Fort Worth Alliance
What forty-one stores would be worth, at four-state scale
41 stores × $350K = $14.4M store EBITDA − $4.4M corporate = $10.0M
× 11 turns
$110M
Illustrative. No sites, no leases and no capital committed outside Arizona. Dutch Bros went Arizona, then Nevada and Utah, then Texas — where it now runs 142 stores, more than any state outside the West Coast.
The same test, four states
The scoreboard at the top of this page made the argument for Arizona. It holds in every market above — and it holds hardest in Texas, where the field is more than twice the size of the other three combined.
| Brand | Arizona | Nevada | Utah | Texas | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starbucks | Cafe and drive-through. Coffee plus a full food menu. | 614 | 293 | 154 | 1,494 |
| Dunkin' | Drive-through. Coffee, doughnuts and sandwiches. | 119 | 40 | ~7 | 254 |
| Dutch Bros | Drive-through. Drinks. Food being retrofitted now. | 85 | 35 | 30 | 220 |
| Black Rock Coffee Bar | Two hundred stores in seven states — and none in Nevada or Utah. | 61 | — | — | 47 |
| 7 Brew | Drinks only. Texas is where it went first and hardest. | 3 | — | 6 | 158 |
| Swig | Utah's own. Proof the drive-through drink habit is native there. | 6 | 2 | 48 | 29 |
| The field today | 888 | 370 | 245 | 2,202 | |
| Outcast at forty-one | 161.8% | 61.6% | 72.9% | 120.5% |
Forty-one stores is one percent of what these four states already support. The emptiest column is Utah — where two of the five national brands have no store at all, and a local chain runs forty-eight.
Starbucks, Dunkin', Dutch Bros and Swig: poidata.io, July–August 2026. Black Rock: company releases, December 2025 (Texas) and August 2026 (Arizona). 7 Brew: company locator, September 2026. Third-party counts move weekly and providers disagree by 10–20% — treat these as orders of magnitude, not audited figures.
The raise
$1,000,000
on a $10 million post-money · the round buys 10.0%
One million to open four stores. Seven million to open eleven more. Then it is a business, not a plan.
TJ Tillman
Founder · Outcast Doughnuts · Metro Phoenix, Arizona
Important information
Every forward figure on this page is a projection