Aussie cooking app ReciMe entices high-profile investors in $1.5 million seed round

Melbourne-born cooking app ReciMe plans to double down on its US expansion, after raising $1.5 million from a group of high-profile investors that would make ideal guests for an exclusive dinner party.

ReciMe was launched in November 2021 by passionate home cooks Christine Nguyen, Ivy Nguyen, and Will Kent, and within 12 months had raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding from the Alice Anderson Fund, Even Capital and Tractor Ventures co-founder Jodie Imam.

The founders moved to New York in April, after growing the user base for their recipe app from 20,000 to more than 400,000 within a year.

Now, they have some of the US’s leading tech executives sitting around their dinner capital table.

The $1.5 million seed funding round was led by existing investor New Zealand-based VC fund Even Capital, and included participation from former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee Marissa Mayer.

Other investors backing ReciMe include Ancestry.com CEO Deb Liu, who previously helped scale Facebook Marketplace, Letterboxd founder Karl von Randow, and prominent Australian e-commerce founder and investor Paul Greenberg.

More than 500,000 home cooks in the US are using ReciMe, which has a global user base of 800,000.

“We’re scaling up ReciMe in the US as that’s our main market now,” says CEO Christine Nguyen when asked by SmartCompany what the new funding will be used for.

“75% of our users are in the US, 10% in Australia and the rest are spread out.”

Even Capital co-founder and managing general partner Sarah Park said it was a “simple decision” for the VC fund to lead the seed funding round, thanks to the startup’s traction and “impressive leadership team”.

“ReciMe holds enormous potential to innovate the experience for home cooks,” she said in a statement. 

Re-building from scratch

It turns out 2023 was a banner year for ReciMe, which released both its importer tool, which allows cooks to build their own ReciMe library, as well as a premium subscription tier.

ReciMe was designed to give home cooks an easy way to organise, share and shop their favourite recipes, and it soon became clear to the founders that the importer tool was the app’s most popular feature.

The tool allows users to collate recipes from a wide array of sources — including recipe blogs, Instagram videos and even their grandmother’s recipe box — on one platform in a matter of seconds.

More than 100,000 unique recipes have been imported to ReciMe to date, and Christine Nguyen says focusing on this importer tool has driven the app’s success.

“When we first released ReciMe, we built too many things, and none of them worked well,” she said in a statement provided to SmartCompany. 

“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.”

This rebuild took place in late 2023, Nguyen confirmed to SmartCompany, and it has driven substantial increases in user retention, which has tripped in the past six months, as well as subscribers and revenue, which have grown twenty-fold.

“The data was clear that our users loved these features more than the social side and so we doubled down on that,” she says. 

The startup now employs a team of six, including the New York-based founders and chief technology officer Nic Pacholski.

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