A Different Kind of Food Company
My co-founder Carter Comstock and I started Freshly with a simple vision: to make it easy to eat healthy, great-tasting food. From day one, that simple idea resonated with our customers and led to 20% monthly growth for the last year and a half since we launched. Over this time, we went from shipping a few hundred meals per month out of a restaurant to nearly a quarter million meals per month out of a 60,000 sq. ft. kitchen.
Today, we are excited to announce that Insight Venture Partners led our Series B financing with participation from current investors Highland Capital Partners, White Star Capital, and Seamless co-founder Jason Finger. This investment will allow us to continue to expand into new markets, hire more amazing and talented people, and broaden our product offering. We are thrilled that this round of financing will continue to fuel our rapid growth and we are equally excited to bring on a partner that is a perfect fit for Freshly. Aside from being one of the top VCs in the country, Insight shares our belief that food tech will continue to dramatically change the food industry.
For us, this story is not about “food tech vs. food tech,” but about food tech challenging traditional food options like restaurants and grocery stores. Food tech companies are approaching modern food consumption in very different ways. Love to cook but don’t like going to the grocery store? Try Blue Apron, HelloFresh, or Plated. Love the idea of a healthy, great-tasting meal but don’t have time to cook? Try Freshly. Want dinner from a nearby restaurant but feel like staying in? Try Grubhub or Seamless. The list goes on and on. Insight recognizes the magnitude of this shift and, as a result, invests heavily in food tech. In addition to their investment in Freshly, they’re lead investors in several food tech companies: HelloFresh (a meal kit delivery company in Europe & the US valued at $2.9B), Delivery Hero (a worldwide online food ordering site valued at $3.1B), and ezCater (an online food ordering system for businesses). We are excited to join this portfolio of world-class food tech companies.
Freshly continues to focus on making healthy eating easier than ever before. Our goal is to get you through your crazy week with delicious meals that make you feel great. We want to provide you with the experience that the rich and famous have enjoyed for years: your own personal chef and nutritionist. By leveraging technology, Freshly is democratizing great-tasting, healthy food in a way that has never been done before. Put another way, we use technology to deliver affordable food that will taste great while helping you become the best version of yourself!
Freshly is able to take raw ingredients and prep, cook, portion, package, and ship you meals in less than one day. Our sophisticated operation and cutting edge packaging allows us to deliver these meals fresh, never frozen. And we do this for around $11 a meal (no delivery fee or tipping), whether you live in the center of a huge city or a small town. Once meals arrive, place them in your refrigerator and, when you’re ready to eat, simply heat and enjoy.
And this is just the beginning. Our talented team is taking the Freshly platform to the next level, from incorporating recommendation engines that personalize and suggest meals based on your individual preferences (think Netflix for food) to building tools that seamlessly track and record your personal nutritional values. We fully expect food tech to deliver a monumental, positive impact on our daily lives and overall health, and we are excited to lead the charge with Insight, our current team of investors, and our amazing Freshly team!
