San Francisco ghost kitchen startup All Day Kitchens has raised $65 million in Series C funding, the company announced Friday, and CEO Ken Chong said some of that investment will be put toward a hiring spree and office expansion at its San Francisco headquarters.
To date, All Day’s total funding is $102.5 million, and proceeds of the new round will be invested into the company's expansion into new markets, research and development and extensive new hiring. Chong told me on Friday the company is looking to quadruple its engineering team in the next six months and double the company’s overall headcount in the coming year.
“We’re really going to ramp up hiring in our San Francisco headquarters,” Chong said, adding that he plans to increase the company’s local office footprint “pretty significantly” from its current WeWork space accommodating about 50 employees to one fit for 100.
The latest funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from GIC, previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and Base10, and new investors Tishman Speyer, Lime CEO Wayne Ting, and health care startup Forward’s co-founders Adrian Aoun and Ilya Abyzov.
With the round, Lightspeed’s partner Alex Taussig has also joined All Day’s board of directors while GIC’s technology investment lead Jeremy Kranz will become a board observer.
All Day Kitchens has more than doubled its outposts in the last year to more than 15 between Chicago and the Bay Area, spaced evenly from San Jose along the Peninsula to Berkeley. Within San Francisco the company has shuttered two of its local food halls in the Marina and in Inner Sunset, but maintains two outposts in the Mission and the Financial District. The company said it plans to invest new capital into its next markets, Texas and Southern California, within the next year.
Chong and Matt Sawchuk, both former employees at UberEats, launched the startup in 2018 in San Francisco as a turnkey solution for restaurants, allowing them to expand their customer reach in delivery optimized without brick-and-mortar investment or onboarding in as little as 10 days.
In May the startup changed its name from Virtual Kitchen Co. and raised a $20 million Series B round it used to solidify its presence in Chicago.
Unlike other food delivery services, the platform lets users pick dishes from multiple restaurants in a single order, pick up orders at the kitchen or dine at on-site seating. On-premise dining has not resumed since the start of the pandemic, and Chong said it’s still an open question of when or if that option will come back.
The kitchen outposts are staffed by the company’s own culinary employees who put the finishing touches on orders after other preparation such as making sauces occurs at larger-scale, third-party commercial kitchens. Typically restaurant clients don’t pay rent at the food hall but share revenue on the delivery orders facilitated by third-party delivery services.
