Last month, voice cooking platform startup TinyChef (formerly known as KloveChef) acquired Zelish, a meal-planning app that was part of the BSH/Techstars Future Home Accelerator.
The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, gives TinyChef an app and shoppable recipes to go with their voice-based cooking platform. TinyChef also said they are in the process of raising a $750,000 Series A round.
I asked TinyChef CEO Bahubali Shete to tell us more about the reasoning behind the deal and give us an update on the combined business. You can see our interview below:
Can you tell us why you felt like acquiring a shoppable recipe startup made sense for you?
Zelish isn’t just a shoppable recipe platform. Yes, this is one of their offerings, but their primary offering is to help people plan, shop and cook. Shop Recipes is a mere subset of the core offering that was essential as people were locked up at home and wanted to replicate exotic chef-made dishes, which also helped them bring in spreading awareness & getting a good chunk of revenue.
We conducted thorough research studies in North America of both smart speaker users and non-users. It was evident that people would continue to use their smartphones as personal device and smart speakers would be more like a family devices.
We recognized that some parts of the kitchen journey like discovery, planning and shopping, were easier to do on a handheld smart device.
In summary, while consumers like handsfree cooking with voice assistants, they still want to use smartphones; hence having a companion app that gives the freedom of choosing the device at different parts of the journey is critical to winning the consumers. Zelish had built the entire journey and it made a lot of sense to get on onboard a product that has been tried, tested and much loved by both users and tech editors. Secondly, a shoppable recipe platform with a web plugin is a perfect way to tie up with food influencers with recipe websites/Youtube channels.
How do you see incorporating Zelish’s shoppable recipe and other technology into the TinyChef voice-guided cooking platform/consumer experience?
We feel that Zelish’s offerings can be integrated with ours pretty seamlessly. We are enhancing Zelish’s app experience by empowering users to pick a dish they want to cook on the app and send it to their smart speakers for a hands-free cook-along experience.
The other offering by Zelish is shoppable recipes. Tinychef has a complimentary feature that allowed users to add ingredients to the shopping list. This is a precursor of the shoppable recipes feature. We are now working to integrate Zelish’s shoppable recipes feature into the voice platform.
Can you give an update on current users and other metrics for TinyChef?
TinyChef has 1.4 million unique users on the platform and 120 thousand monthly active users. There are roughly 70,000 meals cooked per month using our cook-along experience. Traffic is currently heavily weighted from India, with approximately 80% coming from India and 20% from North America. The size of our recipe repository is 200,000 with 20,000 of those being actively used by our our users.
How has TinyChef grown in terms of usage? How has the company grown in the past year in terms of employees?
Tinychef’s user base has doubled in the last 8 months. Our users are using hands-free cooking mode way more than ever witnessed before. We have done some pilots with Amazon for voice shopping in India with great success.
We have increased from 9 members to 15 employees over the past year.
Do you have any stats on Zelish?
Zelish has had approximately 130,000 overall downloads. 40% of the downloads are monthly active users.
How did you fund the acquisition? Can you give deal amount?
While we won’t be able to disclose the finer details of the acquisition, we are in the process of raising some additional funds.
We have been able to expedite a couple of our tech offerings by joining hands with Zelish. This acquisition expedited our development plans by almost a year so now we are doubling down to constantly adding more features to both our app & the skill. We now are looking to add more features & fueling our user growth plans. The same would also be supported by user growth plans both in North America and India. The funds would be our fuel to this hockey stick growth in both continents.
How many employees are coming over to TinyChef?
6 employees of Zelish will be joining the TinyChef team.
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