Mylk Guys
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Mylk Guys was a San Francisco-based online vegan grocery store founded in 2018 by Gaurav Maken, Jinesh Shah and Quentin Rousseau, a Y Combinator Summer 2018 company. Billed as 'Amazon for vegans', it offered the widest selection of vegan goods on the web — more than 1,000 hard-to-find products from vegan cheeses and unmilks to cruelty-free personal care — and used data to predict which products would succeed, launching some exclusively. Backed by Y Combinator and RiverPark Ventures ($420K raised), it ceased operations in December 2019.
02 / Mylk Guys FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No founder statement or post-mortem on Mylk Guys's closure was publicly documented. What is known: the company was a small, niche online grocer — a six-person team that raised only $420K — competing in a capital-intensive national grocery-distribution model where incumbents like Thrive Market raised over $111 million. Operating status is listed as closed and it ceased operations in December 2019, a year and a half after launch.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Mylk Guys is founded in San Francisco and joins Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch to build 'Amazon for vegans'.
- Shutdown
Mylk Guys ceases operations in December 2019; operating status is listed as closed.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
CB Insights records $420K total raised by Mylk Guys; no audited loss figure with disclosed subject, period and basis was extracted — the $420K is capital raised, not loss.