Dishpatch, a finish-at-home meal kit service based in the U.K., has raised £10 million (~$14 million USD) in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and LocalGlobe, who co-led the round. Other participants to the round include Stride, Entree Capital, Entrepreneur First, and several angel investors.
The Dishpatch service is a cross between a meal kit company and a restaurant delivery service. The company works with local restaurants to offer consumers a pick of weekly meals that are delivered on Fridays. All food is fully cooked at the restaurant but arrives to customers’ homes cold. Customers themselves handle the final heating and preparation, aided by detailed instructions that accompany that food.
Dishpatch, which has called itself “the antithesis of Deliveroo,” launched during the pandemic as an in-between option for off-premises restaurant meals that’s not quite restaurant delivery but not a box of raw ingredients a la HelloFresh, either.
The finish-at-home meal kit concept as a whole became popular in 2020 during the pandemic. For many restaurants, particularly higher end ones, throwing a fully prepped hot meal into a takeout box and handing it over to a delivery courier was less than ideal. However, with dining rooms closed for the majority of 2020, businesses had to make revenue from other channels. Finish-at-home meal kits provided a way for restaurants to participate in delivery without compromising the integrity of their food concepts. Many of the restaurants now on Dishpatch’s platform started working with the company, which was founded in 2020, for exactly this reason.
Dishpatch currently has 25 restaurant signed to its platform that delivery to the London area — over 50 miles from the city center in some cases. Funds from this seed round will allow 20 more restaurants to join the by the end of the year. The company will also further develop its tech, marketing, distribution, and customer service.
