Shef operates a marketplace that connects local home cooks — largely immigrants, refugees, women (85%) and people of color (80%) — with consumers seeking authentic, homemade dishes. The company provides onboarding, food-safety training and certification, and business tools such as menu formation, pricing, photography, bios and marketing support. Since its 2019 founding the platform has facilitated roughly 3 million dishes and reaches about 70 million people, with many 'shefs' earning six figures and one earning nearly $400,000 in a year. Shef says it has helped ‘shefs’ bring in tens of millions of dollars in net income and currently has thousands of cooks on the platform. The company is executing a nationwide expansion now that laws in all 50 states enable certain homemade food sales, and it plans to grow its engineering team and build product features like improved discovery and meal preference/customization. Shef operates a marketplace that helps local home chefs connect with customers, handle orders, and arrange delivery of pre-ordered homemade meals. Orders are placed as pre-orders so chefs know what to prepare, and delivery models vary by market—sometimes via local delivery networks and sometimes by chefs themselves. The company says it has more than 12,000 home chefs on its waitlist and uses a 150-step onboarding process that includes a food safety certification exam and a food quality assessment. Shef is live in the Bay Area, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Seattle and New York and plans to roll out to additional markets as they can. The company raised a $20M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to support expansion, and Andreessen Horowitz GP Jeff Jordan will join the board. Founders Alvin Salehi and Joey Grassia say much of the funding will go toward legal work to legalize the service in more markets and to onboard chefs as new markets come online; they have hired Danielle Merida, former general counsel for TaskRabbit, to help with that work. Shef operates a marketplace that connects home cooks with local customers, combining the convenience of takeout with homemade meals. The platform enables immigrants, refugees, and out-of-work restaurant cooks to sell high-quality dishes in their neighborhoods. Shef was founded in 2018 and is based in San Francisco, California. It is available in various regions across the U.S. and has served over 200,000 meals. The company says it will use the new funding to expand its service. Shef’s model is supported by changes in home-cooking laws such as California’s Homemade Food Operations Act.

Total raised

$109M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Debt Financing

Latest activity

Mar 2023