Kitchit
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Kitchit was a San Francisco-based on-demand private chef startup founded in 2011 by Brendan Marshall and Ian Ferguson. Its platform sent chefs to users' homes to prepare dinner in their own kitchens - the founders' ambition was to create 'the world's largest, and its first decentralised, restaurant'. It served 100,000 meals since launch, achieved 30-40% gross profit margins, and raised over $8 million including a $7.5 million Series A led by Javelin Venture Partners in December 2014.
02 / Kitchit FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Kitchit's investment runway ran out at a moment of substantial upheaval in the food-tech world, as the founders wrote; despite strong business fundamentals its scale could not compensate for industry turmoil; and a cut-throat market with no investor interest in on-demand food in 2016 - the same wave that killed SpoonRocket and Kitchensurfing - left it no path forward.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Kitchit was founded in San Francisco by Brendan Marshall and Ian Ferguson to send on-demand chefs into customers' homes.
- 7.5 million dollar Series A
The company closed a $7.5 million Series A led by Javelin Venture Partners in December 2014.
- Shutdown
In April 2016 Kitchit announced it would cease operations; the founders published a postmortem blog post titled 'From first bite to the bittersweet finale'.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
On April 22, 2016 Investor's Business Daily reported Kitchit was about to run out of funding and cease operations, which CEO Brendan Marshall initially denied.
- 02
On April 28, 2016 Kitchit announced it would cease operations that Friday.
- 03
Founders Brendan Marshall and Ian Ferguson published a farewell postmortem, 'From first bite to the bittersweet finale', saying their funding runway had ended amid upheaval in the food-tech world.
- 04
The shutdown was part of the 2016 on-demand food shakeout that also killed SpoonRocket, Dinner Lab and rival Kitchensurfing. No audited loss figure was disclosed.