Doubling down on Butternut Box as a co-lead in their £15m Series B
By Eric Martineau-Fortin, Nick Stocks & Alex Wilson
We are thrilled to announce our continued support for Butternut Box as a co-lead in their £15m Series B, alongside new investors Five Seasons with participation from Passion Capital and Literacy Capital. When we last wrote about Butternut Box a year ago we announced that we were leading the £5m Series A to back Kevin and Dave, explaining our reasons for doing so. So a year on, how have they done?
Our belief was that Butternut Box’s offering matches perfectly with our thesis of what drives successful DTC brands, where a premium service must have a strong brand and emotional hook, and as a subscription service, it addressed a recurring need rather than a want. Furthermore, we stated that the humanisation of pets leads to premiumisation and digitisation as the two leading market trends. Fast forward to today, they’ve served over 8 million meals, grown 8x in the last year alone, with customer satisfaction at 9.8 on Trustpilot. And they’ve shown 2this is not just a service for urbanites, 55% of their customer base is well distributed outside of London with that number growing daily.
While their traction has been great, their continued passion for their mission is what has most impressed us and it permeates throughout the entire company, from the employees, all the way through to the customers and community. This was one of the key reasons for our decision to invest last year, something we emphasised strongly in our last post. Since they launched the company, 3 years ago, they have had the lowest employee turnover out of any of the companies we at White Star Capital have been involved with. Very few companies can make this claim — Butternut Box is truly a great place to work. A look at their LinkedIn or Instagram offers insight into their culture, as well as to how engaged the Butternut Box community is. This Butternut Community is growing exponentially, and this is the holy grail for any DTC brand.
What does it mean to be a part of the White Star Family? For the entrepreneurs we partner with we think it means having a global support system that is there for every step of their journey. This is something we work very hard to uphold, and it manifests itself in a number of ways, such as introductions to the right people, being active members of the board or, quite simply, a drink when it’s really needed. With David and Kevin we’ve really seen this in practice. Not only through the active participation with the company of three of our team members: Eric, Nick and now Alex (shout out to Edouard who was previously involved), but also in the last round we introduced them to Mike Wystrach, CEO of Freshly, who they’ve now taken on as an advisor, and while we have not really needed to have that drink, we hope they feel comfortable enough to approach us if the time comes.
Given what they’ve managed to achieve over the last year, there really was no other way to show our conviction than co-leading this round to help Butternut Box take that next step in building Europe’s leading pet wellness brand. Alongside previous investors Eileen Burbidge at Passion Capital, Paul Pindar at Literacy Capital, newcomer Ivan Farneti at Five Seasons Ventures, who brings with him a wealth of experience and knowledge of the food tech space, and Richard Flint, former CEO of Sky Bet, who joins the board as part of this round, we cannot wait to get going!
