An app designed to help home cooks organise and share recipes, ReciMe, has attracted some of America’s leading investors with a $1.5 million seed round.
Originating in Australia in late 2022, the app was founded by a trio of passionate home-cooks. The company has recently relocated to New York City and captured the attention of over 500,000 home cooks across America.
One of these co-founders and CEO of ReciMe, Christine Nguyen says Recime is a platform for home cooks to organise their recipes, with one key difference from other apps being that they don’t publish their own recipes.
“What we do is we help home cooks to organise the recipes,” Nguyen tells Women’s Agenda. “If you have recipes on Tiktok and Instagram and different recipe websites and blogs, even recipes that you’ve like printed out or recipes that your grandma has written down for you, we have tools that help you to import them all into our platform.
“And then from there, it’s really easy for you to meal plan and grocery shop and do any of the admin associated with recipes and cooking. So our goal is to really allow you, as a home cook, to focus on the cooking itself.”
To day, over 100,000 unique recipes have been imported to Recime, and over the last six months, user retention has tripled, and ReciMe has since introduced a subscription model with an impressive 20x increase in subscribers and revenue.
Nguyen’s fellow co-founders are Ivy Nguyen, Will Kent and CTO Nic Pacholski.
With the seed round that ReciMe has raised, Nguyen says they’re all really excited about the growth to come.
“With the money that we’ve raised, I will be able to hire a lot more quickly. We’re able to take more risks in terms of building new features, and getting a lot more creative with our marketing as well,” she says.
The investment round was led by New Zealand-based VC Even Capital alongside some of the biggest names in consumer tech, including Marissa Mayer, ex-CEO of Yahoo and the 20th employee at Google, who is widely known for designing Google’s iconic home page.
Other investors include Deb Liu, the CEO of Ancestry.com, who also led the team that pitched, built and scaled Facebook Marketplace; Karl von Randow, the founder of Letterboxd, now the fastest-growing community of film-lovers; and Paul Greenberg, well known Australian e-commerce pioneer and investor.
Nguyen says that when the business launched about a year and a half ago, one of the main challenges for herself and the team was the fundraising aspect of their venture.
“When I started out, I didn’t know anyone in startups. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t have a background in it. I wasn’t in tech, and so I was putting myself out there in many different ways,” she said.
“There was a big piece around just having to go to networking events and asking people there that I met, you know, ‘do you know anyone who I should speak to, who can give me advice on this?’, or ‘do you know anyone who’s investing at the moment who might be interested in what I’m building?’.”
“What I’ve learned is that so many people are willing to help if you just ask, and we never lose anything by asking.”
Nguyen’s advice for other entrepreneurs is to put the fear of the unknown to the side and work on building up your network.
“We have to learn to be a little bit shameless about it and be direct and put ourselves out there.”