Eat Club feasts on meal deliveries to tech firms
Catering to demand to serve free lunch
It’s always lunchtime at Eat Club. This Redwood City startup coordinates food deliveries for companies that offer free or discounted lunch as an employee perk. It is trending on startup database Crunchbase this week because it just expanded its services to New York City. It is now in three cities, the others being San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Eat Club, founded in 2010, is one of several Silicon Valley companies capitalizing on a very popular trend in the tech world: free food. Along with lunch — and sometimes dinner options — many Bay Area startups are fully equipped with snack and drink stations. The idea behind a stocked kitchen is simple: Wellfed employees are more productive, especially when they don’t need to leave the office for 30 minutes to go grab something to eat.
Eat Club is similar to competitors ZeroCater and Zesty, both of which
Editor’s note: Here are three Bay Area startups worth watching this week.
also offer catered lunch deliveries. The difference is that Eat Club’s meals are boxed and individualized, whereas competitors typically serve food familystyle. Some of Eat Club’s food comes from restaurants, and the rest from company chefs.
Founder Rodrigo Santibáñez said free food can help companies retain top talent and create a more collaborative workplace: “Companies understand the value of offering lunch as their benefits,” he said. How it works: Each morning, employees can scroll through Eat Club’s daily offerings — ranging from a miso shrimp bowl dish to a chicken tostada salad — and use the app to choose what they want. If they order by 10 a.m., it will arrive in their office by lunchtime. Funding: $46.5 million Employees: 650
Deal of the week
Data analytics service provider Splunk, a public company, acquired Palo Alto startup Phantom for $350 million. Why this happened: Phantom, founded in 2014, uses machine learning to help companies automate responses to digital threats. Automation in cybersecurity is increasingly important as the number of human experts falls short of demand.
Haiyan Song, Splunk’s senior vice president of security markets, said the acquisition will help customers accelerate their response to security threats. “Security is very much a team sport,” Song said. On another note: Last year Splunk paid $2.7 million to settle allegations from the U.S. Department of Labor that it had discriminated against African American and Asian job candidates between 2010 and 2012. Since then, the company said, it has undertaken several initiatives, including diversity training for the entire company. It reports its breakdown as: Male: 75 percent; female: 25 percent; white: 65.1 percent; Asian: 25.1 percent; Hispanic 4.4 percent; black: 2.1 percent.
As with many Silicon Valley companies, employees are still overwhelmingly white and male. On its website, Splunk says, “Publishing our data will help hold us accountable ... and further influence our industry to drive positive change.”
Employees: More than 3,000 worldwide, according to the company
A dash of cash
What happened: DoorDash, a 5-year-old San Francisco fooddelivery company, recently received $535 million in additional funding. What’s it going do with all that money? DoorDash delivers from 100,000 restaurants and operates in 600 cities. But that isn’t enough for CEO Tony Xu, who said the firm will use the extra investment to triple its reach. DoorDash plans to add around 250 people, bringing it to about 800 employees across the U.S. and Canada. Stiff competition: DoorDash is trying to dominate the extremely crowded space of food delivery. Other front runners include GrubHub, UberEats and, of course, online behemoth Amazon.