Galley Solutionsa food data company that provides food companies with technology to make more profitable decisions around their culinary businesses has raised $14.2 million in Series A funding.
Ian Christopher, COO, started the company along with his brother-in-law, CEO Benji Koltai, in 2017. The food venture planning tool grew out of Koltai’s previous work at Sprig, a delivery restaurant founded by CEO Gagan Biyani and former Google executive. Chief Nate Keller.
Christopher explained that in the early days there was no registration system, so much of the work was done in a low-tech environment – spreadsheets or pen and pencil. Koltai, who is food sensitive, continued to be fed mislabeled meals and had health reactions.
“He went to the culinary team and just said, ‘Why are we doing this wrong?'” Christopher told TechCrunch. “We have this source of truth for our recipes, so why not spread this to every other corner of this operation, including the labeling and allergen information. That was when a sous chef kindly guided him through the chaos that was their kitchen activities.
Koltai, in collaboration with Keller, took a recipe-centric approach and coded the first version of Galley, which provides clean recipe data, predictive purchasing, smart inventory and accurate food production planning. Keller now partners with Galley as part of its customer success program.
Example Galley Solutions website. Image Credits: Galley Solutions
The company’s technology is a kitchen productivity tool that focuses on key recipe data, and the sourcing and inventory aspects flow from that. For example, the carrots for a carrot soup are mapped to real-time supplier items so the kitchen can make better purchasing decisions and more accurate recipe margins.
Galley works with companies such as DoorDash, Aramark and Chowbotics. The company grew its subscription revenue 280% from last year and saw a net retention rate of 146% in the first quarter of 2022, Christopher said.
It was also at the point in its growth where it reached profitability and was close to cash flow positive when leadership decided to take advantage of its position to scale aggressively.
That’s where the Series A comes in. The investment was led by Astanor Ventures and includes participation from existing investor Zetta Venture Partners. This gives the company $20 million in total funding to date. Galley is the latest startup to bring technology into the kitchen to receive funding. Earlier this year, we also saw Meez raise $6.5 million for his recipe software.
Meanwhile, the new financing enables the company to scale and move into secondary markets to connect supply and demand with a focus on automating purchase decision and purchasing activity.
“We were able to generate millions of dollars in revenue with two salespeople in our organization, so we need to scale our sales force,” said Christopher. The new funding will also go to product and engineering.
Next, the company focuses on sustainability as part of its partnership with Astanor, including sustainability impacts and food waste initiatives.
