La Belle Assiette launched just last year and has already secured its position as the #1 marketplace for private chefs in Europe. The past 6 months were particularly robust ones in terms of their growth as they expanded throughout France and launched in Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the UK and have validated over 350 Chefs on their platform. Impressively, they’ve managed all this on the back of just 2 angel investments totaling $500k.
Given this success, they’ve now gone on to raise a $1.7m seed round with several of France’s top investors, including Nicolas Brusson (BlaBlaCar’s cofounder), Thibaud Elzière (founder of Fotolia and eFounders), Nicolas Bourdin (founder of Extia), the three founders of l’Atelier des Chefs (Europe’s largest cooking classes company) and Kima Ventures, led by Xavier Niel and Jeremie Berrebi. La Belle Assiette’s past investor and NYC based Guillaume Cuvelier (founder of Svedka Vodka, sold to Constellation Brands for $384M) also participated in the round.
In speaking about their seed round, La Belle Assiette CEO Stephen Leguillon, explains “This new round had two objectives : raise fresh capital so we can accelerate growth and surround ourselves with excellent entrepreneurs who successfully built strong companies with similar models”.
They plan to leverage this latest round to build up their development and marketing teams and ramp up their sales and marketing activities, which is quite timely given their plans for a upcoming product launch in November 2014.