Sanjeev Kapoor’s Tinychef acquires food tech start-up, Zelish

Known as the Google Maps of Cooking, Tinychef, co-founded by celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor, has acquired the Bengaluru-based food tech start-up, Zelish for an undisclosed amount. Zelish was started in 2019 to make available food recipes and meal suggestions every day for people along with generating grocery lists directly from recipes.

It has won the Google Best App Award for 2020 and had 95000+ users with over 10,000 daily active users at the end of 2020. Currently, the platform has about 125,000 users. 

Commenting on the acquisition, Sanjeev Kapoor, co-founder, Tinychef, said, "We have tied up with couple of fulfilment partners overseas and now in India. Now with the work Zelish has done, it had created a great content platform with active engagement and done it very quickly. Our intent was to use their work and also use their energy. So, it is not just we have acquired the hardware, it is something that Zelish team is also a part of it. We thought that since food is a very focused area, we have to see that we work with somebody who understands it."

Started in 2017, Tinychef is an AI platform which gives its users easy access to plan, shop and cook seamlessly across devices. The company is looking at aggressively expanding in the US and European markets over the next few years, is targeting $40-50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by December 2025.

Bahubali Shete, co-founder, Tinychef, said, “The acquisition of Zelish gives Tinychef a powerful app with a highly engaged user base. Our users will now be able to discover recipes and plan their meals, shop for products, and indulge in voice-guided cooking. This is exciting as voice search queries in India are growing at 270 per cent and over 82 per cent of smartphone users are already using voice search on a regular basis.” 

The app has over a million users and over one lakh active monthly users in India and more than 25,000 users in North America (US and Canada). Shete added that they have raised over $2 million in venture capital from investors including Rajan Anandan (Managing Director, Sequoia), Kanwar Chadha (Binatone Group Chairman), and others, along with institutional investors such as SOSV, LetsVenture, IFFCO, and others. 

Nearly four million recipes were requested and over 1.7 million meals have been cooked using the Tinychef skill on Alexa in India alone, while over half a million recipes were made using Zelish last year.

"We want to bring the world of food together on one platform and then make it one of the largest focused platforms for cooking in an intelligent way and also shopping related to cooking," concluded Kapoor.