Skip to main content

Healthy Food Delivery Startup Zesty Served $17 Million In Funding To Cater Beyond The Bay




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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...