Galley Solutions, a food data company providing food operators with technology to make more profitable decisions around their culinary operations, raised $14.2 million in Series A funding.
Ian Christopher, COO, started the company with his brother-in-law, Benji Koltai, CEO, in 2017. The food enterprise resource planning tool came out of Koltai’s previous work at Sprig, a delivery-only restaurant started by CEO Gagan Biyani and former Google executive chef Nate Keller.
Christopher explained that in the early days, there was not a system of record, so much of the work was done in a low-tech environment — spreadsheets or pen and pencil. Koltai, who has food sensitivities, kept getting mislabeled meals and having health reactions.
“He went to the culinary team and just said, like, ‘Why are we getting this wrong?’” Christopher told TechCrunch. “We have this source of truth for our recipes, so why isn’t this propagating every other corner of this operation, including the labeling and the allergen information. That was when a sous chef kindly walked him through the chaos that was their kitchen operations.”
Koltai, working 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 is now working with Galley as a part of its customer success program.
Galley Solutions website example. Image Credits: Galley Solutions
The company’s technology is a kitchen productivity tool that focuses on core recipe data, and the purchasing and inventory aspects stem from that. For example, the carrots for a carrot soup are mapped to real-time vendor items so the kitchen can make better purchasing decisions and more accurate recipe margins.
Galley works with companies like DoorDash, Aramark and Chowbotics. The company grew its subscription revenue by 280% from last year and saw a 146% net dollar retention in the first quarter of 2022, Christopher said.
It was also at the point in its growth where it was reaching profitability and was close to cash-flow positive when leadership decided to take advantage of its position to aggressively scale.
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, bringing technology into the kitchen, to receive funding. Earlier this year, we also saw Meez raise $6.5 million for its recipe software.
Meanwhile, the new funding enables the company to scale and move into secondary marketplaces to connect supply and demand with a focus on automating the purchasing decision and purchasing activity.
“We were able to get to millions of dollars in revenue with two salespeople in our organization, so we have to scale our sales team,” Christopher said. The new funding will also go toward product and engineering.
Up next, the company is focusing on sustainability as part of its partnership with Astanor, including sustainability impacts and initiatives around food waste.