An increasing number of companies offer their employees catered lunches. And it’s not just a trend among companies on the coasts—catering companies have popped up all over the country.
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And that includes Minneapolis, which counts office lunch catering and delivery company Foodsby among its ranks of rapidly growing companies. According to paperwork filed with the SEC today, the company is almost finished raising $13.75 million in what is likely a Series B round.
According to Crunchbase data, Foodsby has raised $6.9 million to date across two prior rounds. The most recent round was a $5.9 million Series A round announced in March 2017. Foodsby’s prior investors include Greycroft, Corazon Capital, Rally Ventures, and Come Up Capital, according to Crunchbase data.
Today’s SEC filing said that five investors committed capital to the funding round, but the filing doesn’t specify who the investors are. Sometimes, it’s possible to tell which investors were involved based on changes to the company’s board of directors.
Here are the executive and non-executive directors on Foodsby’s board, as listed on the regulatory filing:
- Ben Cattoor, a co-founder and the present of the company.
- Kevin Cattoor, Foodsby’s chief financial officer.
- Brian Bispala, most recently the founder of Aftercode, has been a member of Foodsby’s board since early 2015.
- William “Bo” Peabody, an entrepreneur and investor at Greycroft, which led Foodsby’s seed round and co-led its Series A round.
- Phil Soran, a serial entrepreneur who serves as a director at Piper Jaffray. Between 2014 and June 2018, he was the co-founder and chairperson of Flipgrid, which was acquired by Microsoft for an as-yet undisclosed sum. He was previously the founding CEO of Compellent Technologies (sold to Dell for a total $960 million, net of cash) and Xiotech (now called X-IO), which Seagate purchased in 2000 for $360 million.
- Jeffrey Hinck, a partner at Rally Ventures, which invested in Foodsby’s Series A round.
- Theodore Christianson, Minneapolis-based managing director and group head of Piper Jaffray’s capital advisory group
The representatives from Piper Jaffray and Jeffrey Hinck of Rally Ventures weren’t listed on the filing for Foodsby’s Series A. It should be noted that, sometimes, filings don’t reflect the current state of a company’s board at the time of filing.
The market for catered office lunches is potentially huge, and the market remains largely fragmented by city and region.
There aren’t many startups in this particular market, but they continue to raise funding from venture investors. For example, in May 2018, San Francisco-based ZeroCater raised $12 million in a Series B round. In January, Toronto-based Platterz raised $15 million in a Series A round.
There hasn’t been much in the way of catering startup consolidation either, at least not yet. Zesty, a San Francisco-based office catering company which raised $20.7 million in venture capital, was acquired by Square for an undisclosed sum. Zesty was rolled up with Caviar, another food delivery app Square acquired for $90 million in 2014. The only recent acquisition in the catering market was Boston-based ezCater’s buyout of Paris-based GoCater this past July.
With the exception of ezCater, which raised $100 million in June 2018, U.S. catering startups haven’t raised many of the king-making supergiant, $100M or more VC rounds so common in other sectors.
That monarchical ruler of this particular market has yet to be crowned.
Crunchbase News reached out to Foodsby and did not receive comment prior to publication.
This post has been updated to reflect the fact that one catering company has raised a supergiant round.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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