Food delivery startup Zesty turned corporate last year and began an office catering program. The startup now plans to go beyond serving in San Francisco and recently pulled in $17 million in Series A funding to do that.
Index Ventures led the round, with participation from Founders Fund and previous investor Forerunner Ventures.
Zesty raised a healthy $3.7 million in seed money from Y Combinator, SV Angel and others in the spring of 2014. The startup now possesses a total of $20.7 million in venture capital to use for its expansion plans.
Zesty differentiates itself from other catering companies like ZeroCater by offering startups in San Francisco with 10-1,000 employees a healthier meal option.
The startup brings meals into companies on an agreed-upon schedule and works with individual SF restaurants to ensure there’s no added sugar or MSG in meals. All meals come with a list of ingredients, as well as calories per serving so that those watching their weight or wanting to eat healthy know what’s going into their body.
Restaurants benefit from the service by letting Zesty handle all the delivery and scheduling logistics and then picking up a cut of the catering revenue. According to Zesty, some of the top restaurants the startup partners with earn an extra half a million in revenue per year from the service.
The startup gained popularity last year after becoming a catering service to some of the better-known startups in town, including Slack, Instacart, Twitch, Eventbrite and Clever. It now serves tens of thousands of meals every week to hundreds of companies, according to the co-founders. Zesty also delivers to TechCrunch on certain days of the week.
“We believe we are now the largest catering company by revenue in San Francisco,” co-founder David Langer told TechCrunch. “We are already on an eight-figure gross revenue run-rate, and we had a waiting list for the first six months of 2014 due to such overwhelming demand.”
Zesty plans to use the new cash to expand that growing business into new markets. Langer did not want to disclose where those places were, but you can bet it will most likely be in places with a lot of companies and growing startups looking for healthy catering.
Zesty will also use the fresh infusion to double its team of 30 over the next 12 months. The startup tells us it will be hiring across the board, but, like most of the startups around here, with a heavy emphasis on engineering.
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