SEATTLE, WA — When Seattle tech entrepreneurs Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry were looking for a cow to buy, they turned — of course — to Google. It was 2015, and Heitzeberg and Lowry had an interesting new business idea: selling cows online. More specifically, putting a cow online and letting people buy individual cuts of meat.

You've heard of crowd-sourcing, but this is cow-sourcing. Heitzeberg and Lowry stumbled across the idea after a friend told them he was having a large quantity of butchered beef delivered to his house. The two Seattle tech veterans thought it might work better if people could buy high-quality cuts of beef in quantities they could manage at home. Restaurants buy butchered beef direct from ranches but usually in quantities much too big for a home refrigerator.



They sourced their first cow after finding a rancher — yes, by Googling "Washington best beef" — willing to work with a couple of tech guys from Seattle. Ranchers quickly taught them the difference between a cow (milk) and a steer (beef), for example. Crowd Cow was born after they built a website and offered the first cow for sale. They initially sent the link to friends, but those friends shared it, and the service spread quickly around the Seattle area. "Total strangers were putting their credit card numbers on the website," Heitzeberg recalls.

On Tuesday, Crowd Cow went national. Up until this week, the service, with cows sourced from Washington ranches, was only available in Washington state and California. After a round of funding earlier this year, Crowd Cow invested in an East Coast distribution center and hiring beef scouts — people who will go out and source high-quality meat around the country. Heitzeberg and Lowry are veterans of the Seattle tech scene. Heitzeberg arrived in the early 1990s to work at Microsoft and more recently was the entrepreneur in residence at Madrona Venture Group. Lowry was a founder of Urbanspoon (now Zomato).

Crowd Cow does have a few competitors in the online meat market but not quite with the same sourcing model. For $129 per month, Butcher Box will ship you a box of beef or pork. Then there are the big boys, like Omaha Steaks or Lobel's, which allow you to buy pricey individual cuts. With Crowd Cow, you get a more personal beef-buying experience.

Right now, Crowd Cow is selling a steer from Gebbers Cattle in Brewster, Washington (as of Tuesday morning, it was 40 percent sold). You can buy pieces like rump roast, kidney and rib steak. But you also get to learn about Gebbers Cattle and see pictures of conditions on the farm. There's even a video about the steer.

Now that the founders have the logistics of cow sourcing down, they're exploring other animals to source. Look out for pig sourcing, chicken sourcing and maybe even salmon sourcing.