The $200 Million Dollar Ice Cream Everyone Wants To Put On Instagram

Bella Agilar didn’t mind dishing out $38 dollars for a chance to go to Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco.

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“I thought [tickets would] be much more, like $200 or $300,” Agilar said, while standing in line for the museum on Wednesday. For reference, general admission tickets to the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art a few streets away are $25 a pop.

Unlike SF’s Moma, however, the Museum of Ice Cream features sprinkle pools, a “sweeter theatre,” and free ice cream samples. On Wednesday, employees, dressed from head to toe in millennial pink jumpsuits, sported ice cream names like Soft Serve Syd or Pistachio Picazzo.

All that said, the real reason Agilar and many others came to a museum about ice cream was not really about the ice cream.

“There’s always fire Instagram photos from this place,” she said. She then added she wasn’t a big user of social media.

Yesterday, the Museum of Ice Cream closed a $40 million Series A to launch Figure8, a development business that is now its working parent company. The business is now valued at $200 million dollars, and the most recent round was led by Elizabeth Street Ventures and Maywic Select Investment.

Since launching in 2016, the Museum of Ice Cream has hosted 1.5 million guests across San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. San Francisco is the museum’s only permanent location.

The Museum also created an ice cream line sold at Target and a makeup collection with Sephora, a press release stated.

When Ryan Almeida and Analise Aldana tried to visit the museum last summer, all the tickets were sold out (you have to pre-buy tickets in order to gain entrance into the Ice Cream haven). Wednesday was their second, more successful attempt.

While Almeida thought the entrance fee cost a little more than expected, Aldana said that it seemed worth it for the photos. The latter was the majority mindset in line, and it is a vote of confidence for the flagship offering of the museum: Do it for the Insta.

All in all, yesterday’s more-than-sprinkles valuation tells us that investors see more opportunity in heavily curated experiences that are Instagram worthy, and that millennial pink isn’t going away any time soon.

Photo Credit: Natasha Mascarenhas