Sprig and Greylock: Delivering delightful meals to your door

Sprig raises $10M Series A from Greylock Partners

Before Sprig, we came home from work every day hungry and tired. We faced empty fridges, an hour of cooking and dishwashing, or unhealthy takeout. We asked ourselves, “Whats for dinner?” and there was no good answer.

Millions of people every day face the same problem. They pour their hearts into their work and want to come home and spend time with their family and friends. And then when it comes to dinner, they are often forced to compromise between the easy option and the good option. The easy options — frozen dinners, take-out Chinese, delivery pizza—don’t provide the nourishment their bodies deserve. The good options—cooking from scratch, grocery shopping, prepared meals services—are either expensive or time-consuming. Too often, we choose the easy options instead of the good ones.

Sprig’s mission is to be both the easy and the good option.

One year ago, we started to dream up solutions to this problem. What if you could open your phone and three taps later have a healthy, delicious meal delivered? What if it could arrive fast, hot, and ready to eat? What if every meal was used local, seasonal ingredients to prepare creative, restaurant-quality meals? If this was possible, we had to build it.

After months of research, we launched Sprig to the public in November 2013. We hand-crafted the Sprig experience to delight customers—from the ease of the app to the speed of delivery to the little surprise dessert bite at the end of the meal. The response has been fantastic. Every day, we look at the Twitter stream, the 5-star Yelp reviews and the e-mails in our support inbox. People like it! People want more!

It became clear we needed to expand, and today we’re excited to announce a Series A investment led by Simon Rothman at Greylock Partners. We will use the funding to enhance the experience for customers in San Francisco, expand to new markets and build out our team.

Simon, Greylock, and the Series A

This is Sprig’s second round of funding. We previously raised $2M in seed financing (full list of investors on AngelList). The seed was led by Brian O’Malley at Battery Ventures. He’s since joined Accel Partners, and we’re thrilled to share that both Battery and Accel are participating in the Series A as well.

As part of the round, Simon Rothman will be joining me on the Sprig board. Simon built eBay Motors, was on the board of Tesla and is widely considered the expert on marketplace businesses. I’ve gotten to know him over the last year, and I can honestly say he’s one of the best investors and operators out there.

You can read more about Simon’s perspective on Sprig here.

The Sprig Team

Too often, people forget that companies aren’t built by individuals. They are built by teams. Groups of people who work in harmony every day towards a common goal. The best part of my job is getting to work with the Sprig team on a daily basis.

We’ve got an all-star culinary team, led by Executive Chef Nate Keller. He previously was Executive Chef at Google, where he built relationships with dozens of local farms — the same farms that we source from at Sprig. He’s joined by our chief culinary advisor Kyle Connaughton, who has worked at three Michelin 3-star restaurants and created the B.A. in Culinary Science at the Culinary Institute of America. Our pastry chef, Jessica Entzel, recently competed in (and won!) the Food Network’s Cutthroat Kitchen and previously worked with Iron Chef Morimoto, Gordon Ramsay, Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges.

The headquarters team is also fantastic, led by my three co-founders. Neeraj Berry and our operations team ensure Sprig arrives quickly and with a smile. Morgan Springer focuses on customer experience, obsessing over how to make your Sprig experience delightful. Matt Kent leads an engineering team that has the crazy task of building beautiful client apps for iOS and Android while also optimizing our delivery and inventory management algorithms.

Together, we work hard to make hand-crafted, locally-sourced meals available quickly and affordably to anyone with a mobile phone. To find out more, you can reach any of us via e-mail: firstname[at]eatsprig.com. And if you’d like to join us on this adventure, open positions are available here.