Zerocater aggregates local restaurants, catering suppliers and commissary kitchens to provide office meal delivery and managed food services. It offers Cloud Cafe (pre-ordered boxed meals), Managed Cafe (buffet-style, pre-determined by pre-ordering) and one-off event services that Zerocater designs, staffs and delivers. The company operates a FoodIQ platform that uses AI and analytics to personalize menus and provide business intelligence; it works with roughly 450 food providers and curates 10 daily cuisines, 70 daily menu items, over 120 cuisines and 20,000 unique menu items. Zerocater was incubated at Y Combinator in 2011 and rebuilt after COVID-19, growing headcount from a handful in spring 2020 to 50 in 2021 and 175 in 2022, with plans to reach 200. Revenues grew three-fold in the last 12 months and the company says it has been profitable almost from the start; it has raised $38.5 million to date. The company plans to expand geographically beyond its current NYC and Bay Area markets and broaden its digital cafeteria services and FoodIQ capabilities. ZeroCater provides office catering and snacks to businesses, deploying technology to manage operations and customer/vendor connections. The company collects feedback after every meal via its dashboard, emails and physical on-site terminals. Its platform gives customers insight into employee feedback as well as data on company spending and consumption. ZeroCater serves clients including Dropbox, Fandango, RetailMeNot and Salesforce across San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Austin and Los Angeles. Led by founder and CEO Arram Sabeti, the company plans to use new funds to expand into additional markets in 2018. The articles report a $12M Series B as the latest financing event. ZeroCater provides a concierge corporate catering service that brings local food vendors onsite to client offices. It partners with independent restaurants, food trucks and private chefs to deliver meals across the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, Washington, DC and Austin. The company was founded in 2009 and went through Y Combinator in 2011. In August 2015 ZeroCater announced it had surpassed $100 million in sales and, as of the article, serves over 1,000 companies tens of thousands of meals each day. The company raised $4.1M and intends to use the funds to expand its product and engineering teams. ZeroCater arranges and manages regular office lunches by coordinating orders, dietary restrictions, and deliveries from local restaurants. The company guarantees large order sizes to attract higher-end restaurants that typically do not offer delivery and rotates vendors to avoid menu fatigue. Customers sign up, provide headcounts and dietary needs, and ZeroCater handles the rest of the logistics. The service is currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area. ZeroCater plans to use the new funding to expand into other markets, with New York City listed as the next target. Cofounder Arram Sabeti is quoted in coverage about the expansion plans.

Total raised

$33M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Feb 2023