Startups to Watch: Larabee

Editor’s note: This is one of our Startups to Watch of 2022. See the rest here.

After more than five years of iterations, food expert and Cooking Channel alum Grace Choi is ready to see what her company can do.

Larabee — her tech platform that guides users through each step of any given process, from baking a cake to riding a bike — opened 2022 with a plan to close a $500,000 seed round by the end of January. That’s half of its original $1 million target, though Choi attributed that to the challenges of first-time fundraising and a need to protect the product from copycats.

The new funds will help Larabee invest in its product, raise brand awareness and better position itself for subsequent funding rounds — a strategy shift informed by conversations with investors, she said. "The next year is going to be critical in terms of getting product market fit, starting to expand the team and validating our value proposition.”

The pre-revenue startup is now working with a few companies to create content and test the experiences with their audiences — Larabee’s platform aims to make step-by-step processes easier and more interactive, with self-guided videos and other demonstration tools. Its latest clients include “one of the most globally recognizable names in hospitality” and “a leading medical device manufacturer,” Choi said, declining to disclose names.

Larabee lives in a space saturated by players such as MasterClass and YouTube videos, but Choi insists her platform’s special sauce — that it’s built for learning as you go — sets it apart. So she’s pitching it to businesses and celebrities to use it for their own brands, in addition to its software-as-a-service platform, a toolkit others can use to create and upload content, just as Squarespace works for websites.

Choi, a D.C.-area native, graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2003 with an economics degree before attending culinary school in New York and working in restaurants in Italy. She returned to New York to work in food production, then had a five-year stint with the Food Network’s Cooking Channel, where she hosted “Cooking with Grace.” While pursuing her doctorate in food studies from New York University, which she earned in 2014, she worked for a private equity firm before stepping away to start Larabee.

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