Javelin leads $7.5M Series A round into Kitchit

Kitchit hopes to bring the restaurant experience (no cooking, no serving, no cleaning) to every home

Recently, I had a dinner party and hired Habanas, a Cuban restaurant in Alameda. It's an amazing deal. A server comes to your home, sets up, serves the meal and drinks, and cleans up - all for about $40-plus per person, not including alcohol and beverage costs. But Habanas is one of the few restaurants in Alameda that provides this kind of catering service. 

It's no wonder services like Kitchit have appeal. Kitchit brings the restaurant experience to your home. And unlike my experience, where a server brought in the food cooked, through Kitchit, a chef or aspiring chef comes in and cooks the food in your house, giving the experience a more home-cooked feel.

Kitchit, a service that brings a restaurant dining experience to the home, announced Tuesday that it's raised $7.5 million in Series A financing, led by Javelin Venture Partners, as well as existing investors, including 500 Startups and about 15 angel investors. As part of the investment, two Javelin partners - Alex Gurevich as well Noah Doyle - joined the board. The news comes just a couple weeks after Kitchit unveiled its Kitchit Tonight service, which allows people to order a chef to cook, serve and clean up for $39 per person. 

Since launching a few weeks ago, Kitchit Tonight has served several thousand dinners with roughly 100 chefs just in the San Francisco/Bay Area, said 28-year-old Brendan Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Kitchit. 

Kitchit Tonight is part of the company's effort to bring the in-house-chef dining experience heretofore relegated to the more affluent homes to the masses. Given that the average restaurant bill is $42 per person, not including alcohol, according to Marshall, citing third-party reports, Kitchit hopes it can expand its service to a much broader market.

"When Kitchit first started, it was a marketplace product to match diners to find high-end chefs to cater dinners at a price point between $75 to $100," said Gurevich, who's known Marshall since Stanford Business School, where they both graduated in 2011. "It was more affluent with fewer use cases... I've been tracking them for three years and we tried it ourselves and also thought there wasn't a big enough market because they were catering to a more affluent crowd. But they took our feedback and came up with a product to open up the market.

"By launching this product [Kitchit Tonight], they're allowing people to book a chef for parties all the way down to two people for $39 per person."

But how does a chef make money at that price with only two guests?, I asked Gurevich. Kitchit pays chefs a flat fee of $30 per hour. So if an order comes in for two people, that's $78. The chef will probably work for two hours and get $60. The chef doesn't have to buy any ingredients however. In fact, with Kitchit Tonight, all the ingredients and food is prepped at a Kitchit facility. All the chef has to do is pick it up and drive to the household. The chef pockets $60 and whatever tip a customer wants to pay, and Kitchit takes the $18 and uses that for food. Given that the facility is used to prep other orders, there could be some margin, especially if the dinner doesn't require an expensive steak, lobster or duck leg, which it doesn't.  

Gurevich expects that Kitchit Tonight will attract parties of three to four per household, so those additional people are icing on the cake for Kitchit, assuming they're already breaking even on two people per household. And he expects frequency of usage could be around once a month.

At the moment, Kitchit has about 500 chefs. Marshall wouldn't say how many dinners the company is serving each night, but he did say that about 100,000 people have experienced the dinners. Gurevich alone has already tried Kitchit Tonight several times since it launched, which is a good sign that Gurevich is putting his money where his mouth is.

Going forward, Marshall hopes to expand into different metro areas. At the moment, Kitchit is in the San Francsico area, which covers Silicon Valley to Lake Tahoe, as well as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.