‘Amazon for food’ ChefPrep raises $3m and looks to expand

This booming food delivery firm is poaching staff from Atlassian and Uber and says it will double in size by the end of the year.

ChefPrep co-founders Elle Curran and Josh Abulafia are looking to grow the food delivery start-up. Source: Supplied.

Sydney-based food marketplace start-up ChefPrep is on its way to building the “Amazon for food” and is aiming to double in staff by the end of the year, as restaurants looking to ween off the likes of Uber Eats while maintaining stable delivery revenue streams.

ChefPrep is the brainchild of co-founders and co-CEOs Joshua Abulafia and Elle Curran, who started their company during the pandemic in a bid to help Sydney restaurants weather Covid and deliver frozen at-home meals amid widespread closures and lockdowns.

The company has now raised $3m in a seed funding round led by Artesian Ventures and Canva backers Global Founders Capital, off the back of double-digit growth it’s posted every month since it launched less than a year ago.

The company is also poaching talent from the likes of Uber, Amazon and Atlassian as it scales interstate. It did not disclose its latest valuation.

“We’ve built a product that resonated with restaurants because we’re almost positioning ourselves as the anti-Uber, because we’re working with our partners to give them this new revenue stream that transitions them from food service businesses into food manufacturers,” Mr Abulafia said.

“They’re able to use their downtime, and for consumers they can now order from 30 different restaurants, and soon that will be possible from whichever state you’re in.”

Mr Abulafia said that restaurants are still being impacted by a shift towards remote work and collaboration, so business meetings previously held over lunch physically are now happening over Zoom or Google Chat.

“In this remote world restaurants are still suffering, but they now can have this revenue stream and thrive. We’re giving two times the revenue to these restaurants than they were getting in a year, and consumers are being supported as well.”

The fresh $3m round follows a $1.25m capital raise in May 2021. ChefPrep will use the funding to expand interstate, including Victoria where it’s partnering with CoLab Pantry, which was featured in The Australian’s Innovators 100 list. Its bigger ambitions are to be ‘Amazon for food’.

“If you’re a small merchant with an idea to sell dresses online, there is someone to support you across every step of that journey. But for food that doesn’t exist, unless you’re already at scale,” Mr Abulafia said. “So all these great entrepreneurs, their businesses die on the vine because they don’t have that support. We want to do fulfilment, and help restaurants at every step of their journey.”

Ms Curran said ChefPrep ultimately wants to build a global marketplace to help food makers leverage e-commerce as a complimentary revenue stream to their in-house offering.

“Within the next five years, we plan to launch in overseas markets and connect food lovers with the best global food makers, no matter where they live.”

Rohan Gray, VC Portfolio Manager at Artesian Venture Partners, said he was excited by ChefPrep’s growth numbers to date.

“We feel that Josh and Elle are the perfect team to build out this marketplace,” he said.

Investor Yaniv Bernstein, co-founder at Circular and Airtasker’s former chief operating officer, agreed and described the co-founding team’s vision for ChefPrep as infectious.

“I like to invest in companies and people that marry a huge ambition with a pragmatic and credible approach to achieving it. ChefPrep nails the brief, and I’m proud to be backing them.”