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Deploy Coffee

Veteran-owned coffee cart and café · 2+ locations · NYC: SoHo, Long Island City

The blue cart on the Long Island City waterfront belongs to two Navy veterans who met while stationed in Japan. They took over a SoHo café in 2025, and both sites pour coffee from one Arkansas roaster that publishes what it paid for its green coffee.

Founder-run

The Big Picture

Genuinely Independent

Jimmy Lai and Daniel Singh own Deploy Coffee outright and both still work in it, with no outside investor holding a stake. All of its coffee comes from Onyx Coffee Lab, an Arkansas roaster that publishes what it paid for each green coffee it buys, which is unusual for an operation this size. The SoHo shop is barely a year old and the cart is the rest of the business, so there is little public labor or environmental record in either direction, and the two founders answer to no outside owner.

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Company data last updated August 2026

How does one person build and research all this? They don't: here's how it actually works. Verdicts are our opinions, based on the public sources cited above as of August 2026. Spotted something off? or learn more.