For Five Coffee Roasters secures growth capital for national expansion
New investors are backing For Five's Queens roasting buildout as the brand pushes 40 cafés, 3,500 enterprise accounts and 12 sites under development.
For Five Coffee Roasters is betting that a bigger footprint can still protect the cup in the cup, as fresh growth capital goes into more roasting capacity, more retail doors and a wider wholesale and hospitality push. The real test for the Queens brand is whether it can sharpen its specialty identity while stretching across so many channels at once, or whether speed will strain the systems that keep quality consistent.
Founded in 2010 by Stefanos Vouvoudakis and Tom Tsiplakos, who met in third grade in Whitestone, Queens, For Five built its first roasting base in Maspeth before opening its first café in 2016 on West 46th Street in Times Square. Since then, the company says it has expanded from New York to Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, DC, Virginia, Chicago and Atlanta, and grown into a platform that covers sourcing, cupping, roasting, importing, distributing, equipment and tech services.
The company says it now operates 40 retail locations nationwide, split between 21 standalone cafés and 19 sites inside corporate and hotel venues, with 12 more locations under development. It also says it serves more than 3,500 enterprise partner establishments and employs more than 300 people. That scale gives the new capital a clear mandate: expand production at the Queens roasting facility, accelerate new cafés in metropolitan markets, and deepen the wholesale and hospitality businesses that have become central to the brand’s reach.
The financing was led by Nicholas Karalis, former CEO and executive chairman of BioMatrix Specialty Infusion Pharmacy, and Michael Bapis, managing director at Vios Advisors. Both have joined For Five’s board of directors, giving the company outside voices on capital markets, operations and retail strategy for the first time. That board move signals a more formal expansion phase for a company that has long relied on founder-led momentum and partner-driven growth.
For Five already has a track record of scaling through major relationships. Convene made the company its exclusive coffee provider and café partner across its flexible workplace network in 2019. Carr Properties helped bring For Five into the Washington, DC metro area and Boston the same year, and Sodexo later signed a 10-year exclusive partnership to serve the brand’s coffee and customized food menu across corporate services sites in the US and Canada. With those channels established, the new capital is not about starting over. It is about turning a specialty coffee brand with neighborhood roots into a larger platform without losing the standards that made it worth expanding in the first place.
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