Today Lunch.Co, a food marketplace platform, has announced landing €500k pre-seed funding. The round was led by VEQ, a Swedish venture capital investment company, with Antler and Rockstart as co-investors. The startup plans to use the funding to provide new and exciting ‘Food at Work’ experiences in leading companies in the Nordic region, as they return to offices for hybrid working following the relaxation of pandemic regulations in late September 2021.
Founded in 2019, Lunch.Co is a marketplace platform that works through an app. It allows colleagues to share their home-cooked meals with each other in the workplace while creating deeper connections and engagement. Core to Lunch.Co’s business is building positive social impact and sustainability by allowing users to do good effortlessly by using the Lunch.Co platform.
With this new investment and their partnership with Sodexo – a global leader in contract catering – Lunch.Co is targeting the huge workplace lunch market. Together they are planning to jointly enter offices in Sweden and roll out their significant pipeline in 2022, as employees return to the office. Lunch.Co will also build on its partnership with Coop, Sweden’s leading grocery retailer for sustainability, by boosting its social impact and food waste reduction.
Commenting on the round, Mark Durno, Managing Partner AgriFood, Rockstart said: “Food brings people and communities together. What we like about Lunch.Co is that they enable businesses to encourage colleagues to connect over lunch via a fun platform, which is really important as we head into a blended office/home work environment. Since we first invested in 2020, the team has proved that they can onboard meaningful partners in order to drive scale for the business and Rockstart is pleased to invest further capital to help the business meet this growth potential.”
Aleksey Nikulin, CEO and Co-founder, Lunch.Co also stated: “We want to change the world by making peer-to-peer food and Lunch.Co a new normal way of eating food at work. Just as you would either bring your own packed lunch into work yourself or buy food from a restaurant, café or supermarket, we want the act of buying and sharing your lunch from your colleagues to be just as normal an option and much more fun, smart, and attractive in practice.”
Viktor Gällström, Founding Partner, VEQ commented: “We are very excited to partner with the excellent team behind Lunch.Co. We were impressed by the founders’ vast experience from the food sector and we see enormous potential in this new and innovative vertical of the sharing economy. What is also very important to us are the values our investee companies stand for and Lunch.Co demonstrates their values by donating one meal to people in need for each meal bought on the platform.”
Anders Hammarbäck, Partner, Antler commented: “We have been big supporters of Lunch.Co from the start and love the fantastic product they’ve built – and the team building it. Antler is all about backing brilliant founders with crazy-ambitious ideas that have an impact – and Lunch.Co really fits all these criteria.”
