Today we are happy to announce our co-investment in Lunch.Co, a Rockstart AgriFood portfolio company. The €500k pre-seed 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 experience in leading companies in the Nordic region, as they return to offices, following the relaxation of work from home recommendations by the end of September 2021.
The Stockholm based startup, Lunch.Co is a marketplace platform that works through an app, that allows colleagues to share their home-cooked meals with each other in the workplace while creating deeper connections and engagement in the office. 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 investment and their partnership with Sodexo – a global leader in contract catering, Lunch.Co is targeting the global USD 1 Trillion-plus workplace lunch market and will jointly enter offices this year in Sweden with a significant pipeline for next year to provide a unique meal provisioning offering as employees return to the office. Lunch.Co will also build on its partnership with Coop, Sweden’s leading grocery retailer for sustainability, by improving its sustainability impact in the areas of social impact and food waste reduction and is on track to achieve B Corp certification.
Commenting on the round, Mark Durno, Managing Partner AgriFood, Rockstart states:
“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 states:
“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 comments:
“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 comments:
“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.”
The AgriFood fund is Rockstart’s first fund launched in 2019. In May 2021, Rockstart announced the closing of the fund at €22m with the participation of Vaekstfonden’s Green Future Fund, alongside informal investors and global dairy cooperative Arla Foods. Rockstart AgriFood has invested in 29 startups since its launch in mid-2019, making the fund one of the most active AgriFood investors in the world. The Rockstart AgriFood portfolio companies have collectively raised >€10m in total thus far. Rockstart AgriFood received more than 600 applications this year and selected startups have started this August the Rockstart AgriFood accelerator program.
Congrats to the team and looking forward to seeing them grow further in the coming years.
