ReciMe, an app designed to help home cooks organize and share recipes, has attracted some of the biggest US investors in a $1.5 million seed round.
Launched in Australia in late 2022, the app was founded by a trio of passionate home cooks. The company recently relocated to New York City and has captured the attention of over 500,000 home cooks across the United States.
Christine Nguyen, co-founder and CEO of ReciMe, says that Recime is a platform for home cooks to organize recipes, but a key difference between the app and other apps is that it doesn’t make its own recipes public.
“We help home cooks organize their recipes,” Nguyen said. Women’s Issues“Whether you have recipes on TikTok, Instagram, different recipe sites and blogs, or your favorite recipes that you printed out or your grandma wrote down, we have the tools to import all of that into our platform.
“And from there, it really makes the meal planning and the grocery shopping and all the administrative tasks that are associated with recipes and cooking really easy. So our goal is to let you, the home cook, focus on cooking.”
To date, over 100,000 unique recipes have been imported into Recime, user retention has tripled in the past six months, and ReciMe has introduced a subscription model, resulting in an astounding 20x increase in subscribers and revenue.
Nguyen’s co-founders are Ivy Nguyen, Will Kent and CTO Nic Pacholski.
Now that ReciMe has raised a seed round of funding, Nguyen says everyone is very excited about future growth.
“With this funding, we’ll be able to hire faster, take more risks in building new features and be more creative with our marketing,” she says.
The investment round was led by New Zealand-based venture capital firm Even Capital and included participation from some of the biggest names in consumer technology, including Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo and Google’s 20th employee, who is widely known for designing Google’s iconic homepage.
Other investors include Deb Liu, CEO of Ancestry.com, who led the team that proposed, built and scaled Facebook Marketplace; Karl von Randow, founder of Letterboxd, the fastest growing community for movie lovers today; and Paul Greenberg, Australian e-commerce pioneer and well-known investor.
Nguyen said when he started the business about a year and a half ago, One of the main challenges for her and her team was raising capital for the venture.
“When I started, I didn’t know anyone in startups. I didn’t know anything about startups. I didn’t have any background. I wasn’t in the tech industry, so I was pitching myself in a lot of different ways,” she said.
“A big part of it was going to networking events and asking people I met there, ‘Do you know anyone I could talk to about this or give me advice?’ or ‘Do you know anyone who’s investing right now who might be interested in what I’m building?'”
“What I’ve learned is that if you just ask, many people will be happy to help, and you have nothing to lose by asking.”
Nguyen advises other entrepreneurs to put aside their fear of the unknown and focus on building their network.
“We have to learn to be a little less shy and more open and put ourselves out there.”
