Cooking.com taps $7M loan for expansion
A survivor of the dotcom era, Cooking.com is primarily a shopping site with a recipe section and a few social features tacked on.
The Santa Monica, Calif.-company also offers white-label community sites for large food-related companies such as Starbucks and the Food Network. The full list of white label sites: FoodNetworkStore.com, StarbucksStore.com, KitchenEtc.com, PillsburyStore.com, and BettyCrockerStore.com. The loan will be used, in part, to build out this service.
The company has been around since 1998, but it is apparently doing well for itself – venture debt is similar to a loan from a bank, in that the receiving company doesn’t typically give up equity, but rather may allow the investor to participate in future funding rounds. The fact that Cooking.com was able to obtain this round suggests that it is cash flow positive, and has a high likelihood of paying the loan back within a couple of years.
Cooking.com, which is now almost a decade old, originally took funding totaling almost $100 million from venture firms including Idealab, Pyramid Technology Fund and Hikari Tsushin.
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About the Author, Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.