Back yourself first: Social cooking app ReciMe’s road to $500,000 pre-Seed funding 

Last Updated: Wednesday 3 May, 2023

Stuck for what to cook tonight?

Social cooking app ReciMe is helping thousands of monthly users find cooking inspiration and discover trusted recipes from friends, family and their favorite creators.

Beginning life as a lockdown project for sisters Christine and Ivy Nguyen, and their best friend Will Kent, ReciMe launched in November 2021 and has since grown 50% month-on-month to a community of over 15,000 users.

2023 is set to be even bigger with the trio fresh from a $500,000 pre-Seed capital raise gathering the likes of LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund, Tractor Ventures cofounder Jodie Imam and NZ VC Even Capital.

We spoke to ReciMe Co-Founder Ivy Nguyen about navigating the early-stage investment space as a first-time founder, and her advice for founders looking to do their first raise this year.

ReciMe received investment from a number of different angels and early-stage funds. Could you tell us a bit about how you approached the raise?

The fundraising process was a bit of a black box for us initially because if you didn’t know any founders or investors, you had to rely on what was online to get started, and that’s what we did.

We set the target of raising $500k and as we didn’t have a lead investor from the start, we had to raise money from angel investors and family offices one by one.

Once we had $200k in committed capital, we were able to apply for the Alice Anderson Fund and were very grateful to receive a commitment to invest. With the Alice Anderson Fund conditional commitment, it helped progress conversations to get other investors to commit.

What advice would you give to founders looking to raise their first seed round this year?

We found it useful to reach out to other founders who had recently raised at a similar stage to get their advice. The process of fundraising is mentally taxing and it’s great to have other founders in your corner to bounce ideas off and for support.

We also got a number of our investors from different in-person networking events, so we’d encourage all founders to try and get out and meet people.

How did you make those connections with investors?

As founders, we trialled many different ways to reach out to potential investors and realised that for every 20 cold emails we send, we would convert 4 to meetings and 1 cheque.

Once we had a few commitments from investors, they were very helpful in providing introductions to other potential investors.

As a female-majority team, it was important for us to have investors on board that support female founders and we’re lucky to have found some amazing investors such as NZ VC Even Capital and Jodie Imam with that goal.

Is there anything you wish you knew before starting the process?

In hindsight it would have been good to know not to approach your ‘Tier A’ investors first.

We spent the first few weeks of our raise chatting to VCs and angel investors who invest frequently in early-stage startups but at that time our pitch deck wasn’t great and we still needed more advice on what to change.

We also did not realise how long it might take to fundraise. We began the process mid-2022 and we had heard a lot of success stories from 2021 of companies who raised easily. Unfortunately, when the market turned and the tech stocks crashed, it impacted the speed for us to raise capital, so we’d recommend other founders earmark ~4 months to raise money from angel investors and VC funds.

It’s also important as a team to decide who is in charge of fundraising as it’s just as important to keep growing the business and ensure metrics are trending in the right direction!

What’s up next for ReciMe?

With the money from our pre-seed round, we’re currently in the process of hiring a software engineer to continue building out ReciMe.

We’ve also allocated a portion to marketing ReciMe globally – one of the exciting things we’re proud about is the global nature of ReciMe, with most of our users already based overseas (US, UK, Canada and the Middle East being our biggest).

Closing the gender investment gap

LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund is Victoria’s $10 million fund for women-led startups.

Our goal is to increase the number of women-led startups achieving funding and increase the size of funding rounds for each investment so entrepreneurs like Ivy can gain traction and scale faster.