If you’ve ever stared at your fridge contents like a Masterchef mystery box, wondering how to turn it all into dinner, then a new recipe platform, which just scored $4.15 million in Seed funding from the likes of Blackbird Ventures, could be the answer.
Called Clove, it’s been developed by two former Canva employees, the ex-head of content Anna Guerrero, and marketplace engineering team leader Sam Killin. They’ve taken a Canva-like approach to democratising content creation and distribution with it comes to creating and sharing recipes, placing a focus on discovery.
Blackbird led the raise with support from Silicon Valley VC Shakti, as well as founders and executives from Canva, Pexels and Google Maps.
The investment goes part-way to addressing recent controversy around Blackbird’s investments in women-led startups. Late last month, SmartCompany’s Tegan Jones pointed to 11 consecutive raises in startups run by men, in the five months since the VC committed to investing in more startups led by women. Blackbird said at the time that 10 investments were unannounced and five involved women. Clove is the first of those.
Anna Guerrero headed to Italy after eight years at Canva, going to culinary school and working as a restaurant chef, adding spice to the idea for Clove.
“Cooking is one of the few things we all need to do, but few of us are taught to do it well. Despite the universal need to make daily cooking decisions, there is a growing divide between busy cooks and the ease of access to quality cooking information,” she said.
“Rather than spending hours scrolling through recipes or figuring out how to make the most of what’s in your fridge, we’re incredibly excited to make cooking something millions of people feel confident about and look forward to.”
They built Clove as a two-sided marketplace, that allows home cooks to browse personalised recipes and help them with idea for meals that use up the remaining ingredients in your fridge or develop a week-long menu plan taking into account dietary requirements.
It will give recipe creators the ability to publish simple, high-quality video and text recipes , with a freemium model that allows use to purchase cooking products and upgrade for premium recipes and AI-powered cooking tools.
The seed capital will be used to accelerate Clove’s beta launch by expanding the engineering and design team.
Sam Killin said the recipe writers have challenges when it comes to publishing.
“They’re expensive, hard to use and require creators to work very hard to get discovered, which results in a poor experience for creators and home cooks alike,” he said.
“We’re excited about the technology that’s available to make both publishing and finding recipes effortless.”
Having enjoyed runaway financial success from its early stage and follow-on investments in Canva, Blackbird partner Niki Scevak knows that having been part of the design platform’s original team will be invaluable for the Clove cofounders.
“Anna and Sam bring a unique combination of well-honed creative thinking, skill and ambition to Clove,” he said.
“They both have a deep understanding of what it takes to build a generational company with community at the heart.”
Trending
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.