Amsterdam, September 21, 2021: Rockstart, global accelerator-VC, announces its co-investment in Lunch.Co, a Rockstart AgriFood portfolio company. The €500k pre-seed round was led by VEQ, a Swedish venture capital investment company, with Antler and Rockstart as co-investors. The startup plans to use the funding to provide new and exciting Food at Work experience in leading companies in the Nordic region, as they return to offices, following the relaxation of work from home recommendations by the end of September 2021.
The Stockholm based startup, Lunch.Co is a marketplace platform that works through an app, that allows colleagues to share their home-cooked meals with each other in the workplace while creating deeper connections and engagement in the office. Core to Lunch.Co’s business is building positive social impact and sustainability by allowing users to do good effortlessly by using the Lunch.Co platform. With this investment and their partnership with Sodexo – a global leader in contract catering, Lunch.Co is targeting the global USD 1 Trillion-plus workplace lunch market and will jointly enter offices this year in Sweden with a significant pipeline for next year to provide a unique meal provisioning offering as employees return to the office. Lunch.Co will also build on its partnership with Coop, Sweden’s leading grocery retailer for sustainability, by improving its sustainability impact in the areas of social impact and food waste reduction and is on track to achieve B Corp certification.
Food brings people and communities together. What we like about Lunch.co is that they enable businesses to encourage colleagues to connect over lunch via a fun platform, which is really important as we head into a blended office/home work environment. Since we first invested in 2020, the team has proved that they can onboard meaningful partners in order to drive scale for the business and Rockstart is pleased to invest further capital to help the business meet this growth potential.Mark Durno, Managing Partner AgriFood, Rockstart
We want to change the world by making peer-to-peer food and Lunch.Co a new normal way of eating food at work. Just as you would either bring your own packed lunch into work yourself or buy food from a restaurant, café or supermarket, we want the act of buying and sharing your lunch from your colleagues to be just as normal an option and much more fun, smart, and attractive in practice.Aleksey Nikulin, CEO and Co-founder, Lunch.Co
We are very excited to partner with the excellent team behind Lunch.Co. We were impressed by the founders' vast experience from the food sector and we see enormous potential in this new and innovative vertical of the sharing economy. What is also very important to us are the values our investee companies stand for and Lunch.Co demonstrates their values by donating one meal to people in need for each meal bought on the platform.Viktor Gällström, Founding Partner, VEQ
We have been big supporters of Lunch.Co from the start and love the fantastic product they've built - and the team building it. Antler is all about backing brilliant founders with crazy-ambitious ideas that have an impact - and Lunch.co really fits all these criteria.Anders Hammarbäck, Partner, Antler
The AgriFood fund is Rockstart’s first fund launched in 2019. In May 2021, Rockstart announced the closing of the fund at €22m with the participation of Vaekstfonden’s Green Future Fund, alongside informal investors and global dairy cooperative Arla Foods. Rockstart AgriFood has invested in 29 startups since its launch in mid-2019, making the fund one of the most active AgriFood investors in the world. The Rockstart AgriFood portfolio companies have collectively raised >€10m in total thus far. Rockstart AgriFood received more than 600 applications this year and selected startups have started in August the Rockstart AgriFood accelerator program.
Lunch.Co is a marketplace platform that allows colleagues to connect and share their home-cooked lunches with each other in the office while doing good effortlessly. In this way they get the opportunity to discover new dishes, meet and contribute to a sustainable dining experience. The startup is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.
VEQ is a Stockholm-based investment company focusing on venture capital investments in early stage companies with innovative, digital and scalable businesses, where technology is at the core of the product, or the way the company sells and delivers the product.
Antler is a global early-stage venture capital firm that builds and invests in the defining technology companies of tomorrow. The firm has offices globally across most major entrepreneurial hubs, including in London, Berlin, Stockholm, New York, Singapore and Sydney.
Founded in Singapore in 2017, Antler is on a mission to fundamentally improve the world by enabling and investing in the world's most exceptional people, by building complementary co-founder teams, supporting the teams with deep business model validation and providing a global platform for scaling. To date, Antler has invested in and helped build over 300 companies. Of these companies, 40% have at least one female co-founder, and the founders represent 70 nationalities.
About Rockstart
Rockstart is an early stage investor that empowers purpose-driven founders across three domains: Energy, AgriFood, and Emerging Technologies.
Rockstart invests in early-stage startups from each of the three funds and provides access to capital, market, and expertise by connecting founders with co-investors, mentors, partners, corporates, and the wider Rockstart network.
Rockstart has invested in more than 350 startups and its alumni value to date is more than €1.6bn. Rockstart is an international team of 45+ professionals dedicated to empowering purpose-driven founders to become scalable and drive positive change on a global scale. Rockstart has notable exits such asWercker, Dan.com, Hubs.Com, Bouw7, iClinic, and s and Brincr. The company has offices in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Bogota.
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