May 2026 Investor Update: Sendd

CONFIDENTIAL: Life co-founder acquired, Adi vs Rocky (concrete wall title fight), Food & Beverage live and a $250K friends and family round 🚀

Adiraj Gupta

May 31, 2026

Traction (May 2026)

~147 cumulative stores on Sendd.store, up from 129 in April (+14% MoM)
126 successful Connect payments in May, down 34% on the prior period
$3,311.65 USD Connect payment volume, down 46% on the prior period
~86K content views across channels (~81K Instagram and ~5K LinkedIn), $0 spend, before TikTok and YouTube
Food & Beverage shipped. A full ordering, menus, pickup and delivery vertical. Built, engineered, tested and released by the team without me

Summary

May was a month of two halves.

The first two weeks ran well. I was putting out content regularly, lining up the integrations needed for the US launch and scale, meeting investors and working new customer accounts. I took time off from the 15th off for a fun day of activities that ended in proposing to my partner in the early hours of the 16th, with the NYC skyline in the backdrop. Being a bootstrapped, unfunded founder makes saving for a ring a challenge, with every spare $ typically reinvested into the business, so I was very excited to surprise my now-fiancée with it. Couple of days spent traveling with my parents and getting to visit NASA ( a childhood bucket list for me). Engagement party with family on the 21st, then my cousin’s wedding from the 22nd to the 24th, which was incredible, so good to have so much of the family there from all around the world. Then, in the early hours of the 24th, things went sideways.

At the wedding after-party I went down a very long water slide, head first, into a pool that turned out to be far too small. I didn’t slow down, hit the concrete wall on the far side, climbed back up the hill on my own and sat down to ice what was already a massive bump on my head. Shortly after, I had a seizure. An ambulance took me to hospital for brain, chest, neck and heart scans. Thankfully everything came back clear, but it’s a serious concussion, and I’ve been out since. It’s the 31st now, I’m doing a little more each day, and the medical guidance is 15 to 20 days of rest and follow-up scans before I can be fully back. I Sendd it in everything I do, and this month that caught up with me. A cool scar to show for it, but a painful experience all round and scary for those close to me. Rocky the concrete wall 1, Adi 0. No plans for a rematch. I’ve cancelled all investor meetings from the 24th through early June, and pushed my flight back to NZ to the 8th so I’m not on an 18-hour flight inside the recovery window.

Before the accident, much of my time was going into support, plus prep for the raise and calls with the larger customers we want to activate. And it wasn’t just me. Shawn took the month off, Tum was sick for part of it, Ben is on leave, and Kenia and Vlad (both part-time) were stretched thin elsewhere. For stretches of May, Sendd was running at well below half strength.

We had multiple larger customer activations lined up for the final week of the month. Had I been able to onboard them, April-on-May GMV would have been up 250%+. Instead, with me out, GMV was effectively just our existing sellers continuing to sell, and with smaller events this month, net GMV from those same sellers came in lower. As a no-subscription product, this is expected, and it also means we have no churn function: the cost of keeping an account on Sendd is low. We’ve already seen sellers make sales, go quiet for a month or two, then come back and sell again. In a normal SaaS company that shows up as churn. For us it’s a toggle between actively selling and not actively selling.

Wā Ora PTA, a high school parent-teacher association, ran its first event on Sendd, a pool party, and is working closely with me on a lot more, including a Pink Day appeal and cookie sales. You can see their store at https://sendd.store/WaOraPTA.

I progressed serious conversations on payment integrations that open up India and other new markets. Deep, powerful integrations now just waiting on credentials and commercials to lock in. We’re looking at activating DoorDash in the US to pair with the F&B launch, and we’re working with a few F&B consumer brands to run their launches on Sendd. More on all of this soon.

The extended NYC stay also opened up two brand activations with Tay in early June. On the 4th there’s a fitness event for female founders. Sendd will be part of the activation and Maria will attend to represent the company and connect with the group of founders building brands we can move over to Sendd. We’ll use Tay’s referral code from her Sendd store for the event, and when she launches her marketplace these founders and brands will be able to join it. On the 6th there’s a second activation, a health and wellness event at The Ned, a members-only club in NYC. I’ll attend that one, sit on the panel being hosted, and Sendd will be in front of a room of investors and curated founders. Tay has been awesome looping us into these and making Sendd part of them, and we’re excited for her to go live with the first Sendd Market in the US.

On the raise. A lot of May, before the accident, went into legals and financials, getting every duck in a row. The plan now is to wrap a $250K USD friends and family round on a $5M USD post-money SAFE in the next two weeks. That round lets us execute immediately, and clears the way for me to pick the proper funding conversations back up shortly, with the firms we’ve been lining up. This way we can stay on track for our plans in June.

What We Shipped

Food and Beverage ordering (LIVE). The big one. Menu items with variants, modifier groups, dietary tags and full admin; a customer-facing ordering flow with modifiers, tips and cart integration; pickup scheduling with slot templates, overrides and bookings; distance-based delivery pricing with address validation and fulfilment tracking; and a full Google Maps integration (geocoding, distance matrix and time zones) underneath.

ChatGPT / MCP Store API expansion (LIVE). New MCP-facing endpoints across analytics, categories, collections, coupons, customers, inventory, menu items, rentals and subscribers, plus listing restore support and enquiry submissions handling.

Events and ticketing follow-ups (LIVE). Complimentary tickets with CSV upload; attendee question responses; scanner improvements with audio feedback and persistent scan results; plus a stack of event editing and reliability fixes.

Stabilization sweep. Blank-email fixes across order mailers, a shared QR-code download utility, additional Qippay export fields with NZ bank-prefix validation, and reusable concerns added to the codebase.

Bugs & fixes. The team made over 80+ overdue bug fixes and improvements. With a limited engineering we are always having to trade off bug fixes/improvements and new features. While I was out of action the team solved lots of these issues.

What Moved

Sendd Store frontend generation becomes Sendd Home (Dashboard) plus native MCP. Roland, Jackie and Dev put real time into the frontend builder, but between our current infrastructure, where AI models are today and the rising cost of those models, we’re deferring it until things stabilize. Instead we’re enabling our MCP natively inside the platform and adding Sendd Home, a dashboard that lets less technical users tap the same MCP-powered features without ever touching a chat connector. The MCP has tested well with customers, and this brings it to everyone.

Sendd App Store. I did the business groundwork in the first two weeks and built out the CRM to track the apps that want into our ecosystem. Engineering was too stretched to start the build, so it’s on hold until funding lets us expand the team, at which point it should move quickly.

The Good

Content held up even with me out. ~86K views across channels with $0 spend. The new storytelling account for business owners, Just Sendd It, built from scratch and run entirely by Cyrus, did 44K views. The Sendd Store account did 16K views from resharing content, my personal content 18K (stopped on the 14th) and LinkedIn ~5K. TikTok and YouTube aren’t even in that count yet. Cyrus and Gleb kept this running all month.
Aman joined and has been great at finding and surfacing bugs, which fed the stabilization work above.

The Bad

GMV went backwards. Connect payment volume down 46% on the prior period, driven by the last-week activations I couldn’t onboard (see the Summary).
The accident. A serious concussion that’s kept me out since the 24th and will take another couple of weeks to clear. Full story in the Summary.
Half-strength team. Shawn on a break, Tum sick part of the month, Ben on leave, Kenia and Vlad stretched thin. BD effectively stopped, and all new sign-ups were organic and referral.
Burn stayed high. NYC is expensive and costs held near April levels despite the slowdown (detail in Financials).

Previous Goals Status (May Targets from April Update)

Fundraising

Open and run the pre-seed round in the US: Pushed. Pushed to a future date; focus is on wrapping the $250K F&F round at $5M post-money, closing in the next two weeks
25+ investor meetings: Not Done. Cancelled due to the accident; will pick them back up post F&F round

Sendd.store

175+ cumulative stores: Not Done. Landed ~147
Ship Food and Beverage product type: Done ✅
US shipping live natively: Not Done. The meeting to lock commercials with our shipping partner was cancelled on the 25th, moved to early June
Sendd store frontend generation (V1): Deferred. See What Moved
Sendd App Store (V1 framework): On hold. Business side done, engineering picks it up post-funding (see What Moved)
Resubmit MCP to OpenAI / Claude: Partial. MCP API significantly expanded, resubmission still pending
TEDxVUW runs flawlessly: Done ✅

Sendd.market

+5 US marketplaces to beta / 100+ waitlist: Done ✅. Added more than 5 in May, though adding marketplaces is no longer the focus
Rapid product cycles on discovery and search: Not Done. No marketplace work this month, especially with me away

US Expansion

Ongoing. Activation for Tech Week coming up!

Growth, Content and Team

120K+ views, $0 spend: Not Done. Landed ~86K across channels (see The Good) I think had a been able to keep making content for the entire month. We would have reached the 120k.
Launch educational content series: Not Done. Bandwidth gone with Shawn off and me out.
Remove founder-as-bottleneck: Work in progress. The team shipped the F&B release without me. Ongoing work in progress.

June Goals

Kept deliberately light while I recover.

Close the $250K F&F round at $5M post-money
Two brand activations with Tay in NYC (4th and 6th) and her first US Sendd Market going live
Get back to NZ and activate first marketplace with real GMV. Not in Beta.
Restart BD and growth once the team is back to full strength

Financials

May burn: High. NYC costs kept it up, covered by a significant personal top-up and increased Sendd-side burn. 20k NZD+
Runway: Holds short-term on reserves. Capturing the US market properly needs us to capitalize, which the F&F round starts and the proper round follows.
Capital raise: The $250K USD friends and family round (see the Summary) closes in the next two weeks.

🎯 The Ask

If you’d like to invest in our upcoming round. Or build a relationship with me early for a future round we do.

📅 Book a 15-minute call (from mid-June): https://sendd.store/sendd

🔒 Investor docs: https://sendd.store/sendd

Thank you for the continued trust and support, especially this month.

Adi & The Sendd Team Adi, Dev, Tum, Cyrus, Shawn, Ben, Kenia, Vlad, Maria, Jackie, Roland, Aman

PS: We launched a Sendd rocket at Houston Space Center! Video on socials soon! 🚀

Adiraj's Substack

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