Mealhero: This Belgian startup raised €900,000 of seed funding for its smart food service

Don’t have time to cook your food? Still, want to have tasty food for lunch and dinner every day? Well, a smart food service startup from Belgium has a solution for you.

Mealhero, the food tech startup founded in 2013 by Anton Claeys, Steven Debaere and Jeroen Spitaels brings a smart cooking solution for a healthy and homemade meal.

Healthy homemade food with zero effort

The Belgian based startup developed a smart cooking device to go along with their own freshly frozen food boxes. Their smart steamer recognises all of the Mealhero ingredients and recipes through a smart label and accordingly prepares all different ingredients for a perfect meal in just 15 to 25 minutes of time. With one push of the button, it cooks up to 700 different meals. The meals range from a chicken tikka masala skewer to chili sin carne with wild rice and more.

First investment round

Now recently, Mealhero raised €900,000 in its first round of seed funding and the startup is in full production mode to launch their smart service at the beginning of October 2018.

This will also enable them to start the production of their hardware, food and expand the team. “This seed funding round was crucial to our company. We are a rather atypical startup who combines food, hardware, and software in a very disruptive way,” says Spitaels.

“Because of that, we chose a very specific and strong mix of loans, own investments, and smart capital.”. Mealhero collected its smart capital from incubator imec.istart and a business angel – a former CFO at P&G – with decades of expertise in FMCG.

The startup’s smart food service concept gained popularity in November 2017, when Mealhero launched and overfunded their Kickstarter campaign. In a small market like Belgium and The Netherlands, they raised €80,000 in just one month.

“It was a crazy and hectic month,” says CEO Jeroen Spitaels. “But it was so absolutely amazing to see our community grow each day”. The ambitious team also recently won the award at the European Food & FMCG Innovation Forum as “Leader at the forefront in the future of home cooking”.

Available in October 2018

As of the beginning of October 2018, Mealhero will ship their first batch of smart steamers and food boxes to their customer all over Belgium and The Netherlands.

“For a lot of startups, it’s often a challenge to deliver on their promise after a crowdfunding campaign and delivery everything on time. Since we’ve closed our Kickstarter campaign, our team has been working like mad dogs in order to start up our production. That’s why Mealhero has succeeded in being one of the very few Kickstarter projects to deliver and deliver on time.”

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