AI-powered grocery service adds funding, key hires
Hungryroot, an AI-powered personalized e-grocer with a stable of store brands as part of its service, has named new leaders to steer the company’s growth. In June, the New York-based company raised $40 million in Series C funding.
The investment is being used to accelerate its automation technology, proprietary personalization algorithm and scaling its marketing. Users of the healthy food service take a quiz to narrow in on their likes and dislikes and then Hungryoot prepares an order for the user (or the user can also select products) as well as provides personalized recipes. The company carries brands like Siggi Yogurt and Beyond Meat, but also its own private label items across categories like produce and an award-winning brownie batter and cookie dough batter.
“Hungryroot is pioneering an entirely new way to grocery shop. We leverage proprietary technology to predict and deliver the groceries and recipes that best suit each individual customer’s needs and goals,” said Ben McKean, Hungryroot’s founder and CEO. “The result is a customer-first, curated experience that reduces the average time consumers spend grocery shopping from two to three hours a week, to just two to three minutes. The days of walking into a giant grocery store with an empty cart and browsing through tens of thousands of items will soon be a routine of the past. Hungryroot does the work for customers so they don’t have to.”
As the company grows, it has announced changes to its c-suite. Just last week, Hungryroot tapped Dominic Paschel to be its chief financial officer, bringing extensive experience in initial public offerings of high-growth companies.
He most recently served as SVP at Yext, an AI enterprise search company, where he oversaw investor relations and served as global head of Asia-Pacific finance. In 2011, he led Pandora’s $241 million IPO before it’s $3.5 billion acquisition by Sirius.
Prior to Pandora, he directed the IPO of the SaaS-based HR Cloud Company, SuccessFactors, and implemented its pre- and post-IPO communication strategy, before its eventual $3.4 billion acquisition by SAP. Paschel also managed investor relations at Salesforce, introducing the first pure-play Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company to the capital markets after it went public in 2004.
In his role at Hungryroot, Paschel will lead its financial organization, and will be responsible for accounting, financial planning and analysis, legal, tax, treasury and investor relations. He joins other recent hires: Alex Weinstein as chief digital officer, and Stephanie Retcho as chief marketing officer. Together, they will be focused on driving Hungryroot’s mission of pioneering an entirely new way to grocery shop, and strengthen the leadership team as the company plans for the future, the company said.
Hungryroot is on track to achieve $175 million in revenue this year. The company is forecasting over $300 million of revenue in 2022.