AI could be picking your coffee as startup takes £2m
An AI-powered coffee vending machine which tells its users when and what it might like to drink is set to spring up in forecourts, gyms and campuses across the country.
Unity Coffee, which uses AI to offer tailored discounts based on the time and user behaviour, has completed a £2m fundraising and aims to “disrupt” the coffee market at pace, City PM can reveal.
The startup is led by Scott Martin, who pioneered Costa’s Express vending machine and is now aiming to take on the market dominance of his creation.
Martin co-founded self-service coffee firm Coffee Nation in 1999 and rolled out 1,000 machines in the UK by 1999.
The brand was snapped up by Costa Coffee’s owner Whitbread for £60m in 2011, and Martin became chief executive of Coffee Express before quitting after Coca-Cola bought the firm for £3.9bn in 2019.
Unity Coffee plans to land more than 500 machines in the UK over the next 12 months, hoping to skewer consumers with its pledge to offer coffee at a price one pound lower than the high street.
Unity Coffee takes £2m backing
Unity is backed by a number of investors, including an FTSE 100 chief executive, and plans to follow up its £2m raise with more fundraising at the end of this year.
High street coffee giants like Costa and Starbucks have seen sales slump in recent years as the cost of coffee beans soars.
Coffee price inflation has stuck far above the headline rate of food and drink inflation in recent months, reaching a year record of 18 per cent in July 2025, before softening to six per cent at the start of this year.
But Martin said he can absorb a host of employment and rental costs, making his coffee at least 20 per cent cheaper than on the high street.
He told City PM: “The fundamental premise was: we don’t have rent, we don’t have rates, we don’t have staff. So you take those three things out of the equation, and you automatically have a lower cost of sale than you do if you’re a high street shop.
“So selling coffee at a cheaper price in self-service isn’t rocket science, it’s just basic economics.”
‘Innovation has stopped’
While incumbent coffee chains are struggling, some challenger brands like Black Sheep and Blank Street are on the up – but Martin thinks he can take these on, too.
While the rise of new coffee chains like Blank Street has been boosted by its innovative array of products – which, like matcha, are often hinged on social media trends – Martin says there’s no reason self-service machines can’t offer this range of drinks.
Innovation in the self-service coffee market has dried up, he says, because it is dominated by a single player.
“Innovation [has] stopped, prices have gone up. It’s almost a double whammy to the consumer because we’re getting the benefits of all the other things that we talk about on the high street, [but] I can’t buy matcha, I can’t buy oat milk, I can’t pay by credit card, [and] I can’t use a loyalty app. That’s going backwards,” he said.
Unity’s coffee machines are paired with a mobile app which uses AI to track its users’ preferences and habits, learning when and what its consumers like to drink.
AI-powered coffee suggestions ‘not creepy’
Martin said: “[The app] will know where you are, and it will track what you’re buying. Not in a creepy way, that’s just simply looking at what you’re buying when you’re buying it. And once it’s learned a little bit about what you’re doing in terms of what you buy, when you buy, and where you buy it from, it will then start to be more proactive.”
The app can then offer its users a purchase before they know they want one, Martin says. A student lost in last-minute exam revision might be offered a “midnight matcha” at a discount price, or a gym user might be tapped up for a post-spin class espresso at a discount rate.
“That’s how we’re going to ideally create something that feels much more curated as opposed to quite vanilla,” Martin says.
Unity Coffee is targeting Gen-Z users, who Martin says are less squeamish about AI tracking their preferences, because they know it is used in a host of other aspects of their lives.
He said: “That customer group is far more open to the idea of a personal suggestion based around a deal. I actually think that group of consumers is much more savvy.”
Unity’s machines will also use AI to change how they look, by changing colour and using personalised emojis to reflect the consumer’s preferences or the drink they’re buying, Martin said.
Martin cited Luckin Coffee, China’s largest coffee chain, which specialises in targeted promotions for its self-service machines, as an inspiration for Unity.
“This category needs disrupting. It needs a challenger brand to come in as a sort of spearhead to encourage other brands to come into the space too,” he added.