fbpx
Food and drink

Like them apples: Marissa Mayer backs cooking app ReciMe in $1.5 million Seed round for US growth

- July 2, 2024 2 MIN READ
ReciMe cofounders Ivy Nguyen, Will Kent and Christine Nguyen
ReciMe cofounders Ivy Nguyen, Will Kent and Christine Nguyen
Former Yahoo boss and Google OG Marissa Mayer is among several heavyweight US investors backing Australian cooking app ReciMe in a $1.5 million Seed round to make its mark in the States.

ReciMe began life as a lockdown project for sisters Christine and Ivy Nguyen, and their best friend Will Kent. It launched in late 2021, going on to raise $500,000 in pre-Seed funding in 2022 from the likes of LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson fund and Tractor Ventures cofounder Jodie Imam.

Existing New Zealand investor Even Capital led the latest round, supported by Mayer as well as Ancestry.com CEO Deb Liu, Letterboxd founder Karl von Randow and local ecommerce pioneer Paul Greenberg.

The ReciMe app designed to help home cooks organise, share and shop their recipes.

The ReciMe app

The startup and its cofounding trio recently relocated to New York City and the app has been embraced by more than 500,000 home cooks across America.

The most popular feature is a smart importing tool, which enables users to aggregate all their recipes in one platform within seconds – whether those recipes came from an Instagram video, recipe blog or grandma’s recipe box. So far more than 100,000 unique recipes have been imported to ReciMe.

Christine Nguyen, ReciMe’s CEO, said their success is largely due to the app’s simplicity – a lesson they learn quickly but painfully as they developed it.

“When we first released ReciMe, we built too many things, and none of them worked well,” she said.

“As soon as we realised that our smart importer was our most loved feature, we scrapped everything and re-built our entire app just to drive that one core action.”

That move paid off, with user retention tripling over the last six months as they make their mark in the Big Apple. They’d now introduced a subscription model, which has resulted in an impressive 20x increase in subscribers and revenue.

“We’re thrilled to have such supportive and experienced consumer operators as our investors and cheerleaders,” Nguyen said.

“We’ve never been more motivated and clear on the path ahead.”

Even Capital cofounder and managing general partner Sarah Park can taste success.

“ReciMe holds enormous potential to innovate the experience for home cooks, and their impressive leadership team plus success to date made it a simple decision for us to lead their investment round as they expand globally,” she said. 

As well as giving recipe creators the ability to centralise and organise their efforts and inspirations, ReciMe is also helping less experienced cooks find dishes they can tackle with confidence and address that toughest of questions: what do I cook for dinner tonight?’

It’s available for download at the Apple App Store.