From an IKEA-locker mock-up to a live, award-winning product in a pro sports arena
A Fortune 500 agribusiness’s venture studio had a great COVID-era idea: what if you could order from your phone, walk up to a smart locker, grab a hot meal and a cold drink from the same pod without waiting in line? What the studio didn’t have was a team that could turn it into a manufacturable, venue-ready product.
That’s where Monkeyjump Labs came in. We owned it all: the app, the cloud behind it, and the firmware running on the physical lockers. We carried it all the way from a home-wired prototype to a production pod live in a pro sports arena.
The challenge
A promising concept is not a product. Getting from “wouldn’t it be great if…” to a pod you can install in a stadium means building the full stack at once. We needed a consumer ordering experience, a real-time backend that knows exactly which locker is holding which order, and embedded software running on actual hardware that has to seal, heat, cool, and unlock reliably in the wild. Most shops do one of those things. We had to build all of them, and make sure they worked together seamlessly.
The approach
We ran it on our MVP-to-Scale method: three stages, each answering one honest question.
- Proof of concept, “Can we build this?” IKEA lockers stood in for hardware and a mocked-up app stood in for the product. The point wasn’t to impress anyone; it was to let the team experience the whole flow (order, load, unlock) before a dollar went into custom hardware.
- MVP, “How do we know it’s working?” Real lockers, real firmware, deployed to a handful of restaurants for genuine customer feedback. This is where the unglamorous, physical iteration happened: enclosures that wouldn’t seal, a lock that overheated and got redesigned, roughly a hundred screws per pod. We were on-site building them.
- Scale, “Will it hold up under real traffic?” New design partners produced a manufacturable production pod, and we re-architected the app to run at venue scale.
Under the hood, we built a cloud platform and IoT hub, a mobile ordering app, a real-time backend that pushed live status over web sockets, SMS unlock links, and the C++ device firmware, split across a “parent” controller managing enrollment and over-the-air updates. Then we made it play nicely with the venue ordering systems it had to live alongside, integration by integration.
The result
The product shipped, went live in a professional sports arena, and was named an honoree of a major international consumer-technology innovation award, carried the whole way from that first IKEA-locker experiment to a production pod, with one team owning the software and the hardware throughout. When it was mature enough for the client to run itself, we handed it over clean: a real, physical, integration-heavy product built to survive a stadium on game night.
Who this is for
If your product needs hardware that lives in the physical world, firmware that doesn’t need babysitting, and software customers love, we can build it. We design cloud, mobile, and embedded systems together, so there are no handoffs between teams or gaps in execution.
From early prototypes to production-ready products, we build systems that work in the real world and hand them off cleanly. Whether you’re a funded startup, venture studio, or corporate innovation team, if the challenge is building it, that’s where we come in.
Have an idea that needs to work beyond the prototype? Let’s talk.