London-based Lollipop has raised £5 million in a seed funding round led by Octopus Ventures.
Targeting busy families, particularly with children, Lollipop is the app that finally brings meal planning, shopping, and cooking services all under one umbrella.
The fresh produce is expected to help the startup double the team size from 20 to 40 by year’s end, as well as further flesh out the product offer.
To date, Lollipop has licked £6 million into the shopping cart.
Based on his own personal experience with a newborn son, and the umpteen number of challenges involved for him and his wife, Tom Foster-Carter said that the thing that tipped the couple over the edge was trying to get the weekly shopping done.
“I found myself thinking ‘What if someone else, or something else, took care of all that stress for you?’. Fast forward two years and Lollipop was born,” said Foster-Carter.
Bringing his experience at both Curve and Monzo to the table, Foster-Carter and Co. are now serving that same focus on design and user experience, quite literally, to the table.
A recommendation engine at heart, Lollipop aims to take the dreaded “what’s for dinner?” question out of the vernacular, offering not only its own recommendations but drawing from its user-base to feature ‘Community Picks’.
With recipes aplenty, shoppers can then add any one of some 30,000 ingredients to their baskets and schedule delivery slots via partner Sainsbury’s.
According to Foster-Carter, one item on Lollipop’s roadmap is to add additional partners in the near future.
Lollipop’s seed round was led by Octopus Ventures and saw participation from Anterra Capital, Maki VC, Plug and Play, JamJar, and Speedinvest.
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