Cheetah Technologies Inc., a wholesale food marketplace for restaurants (and the occasional consumer) based in Pleasanton, has closed a $60 million Series C round.
The latest round, announced Wednesday, was co-led by a nutrition-focused investment firm Manna Tree and Sator Grove Holdings. Including the new round, Cheetah has raised at least $127 million, according to Crunchbase, with major investors including AltaIR Capital (also an investor in rapid delivery startup Food Rocket), Hanaco Venture Capital and ICONIQ Capital. The new funds will be invested in technology development, sales and marketing, the company said.
Cheetah was founded in 2015 by CEO Na’ama Moran, Alan Har-Tal and Christopher Elliott, setting up headquarters on Ninth Street in San Francisco but relocating to its central warehouse in Pleasanton at the end of 2020. The company acts as a wholesale supplier for restaurants, coordinating bulk delivery orders via its mobile app and fleet of refrigerated trucks (which are driven by full-time employees rather than independent contractors). It serves a little under 1,000 restaurant customers across the Bay Area, Moran said via email.
The CEO declined to answer when asked if the company is currently profitable.
Cheetah claims it has an edge over competitors such as Costco, Restaurant Depot or Sysco in providing restaurants with lower and more transparent pricing. It also provides a “plus” membership service at $99 per month, which gives users access to three-hour delivery windows, same-day pickup and other perks.
In the first weeks of the 2020 pandemic shutdown when restaurant dining rooms were off limits, Cheetah pivoted to regular consumers to stop the bleeding, offering next-day delivery of harder-to-get items like toilet paper, cleaning supplies, bulk dairy and meat. The company also applied and was approved for $5.7 million in PPP money across two forgivable loans ($3.7 million in April 2020 and $2 million in January 2021) from Silicon Valley Bank.
Consumer-side deliveries quickly became 20% of the company's business, Moran said at the time. Since then, she said, while Cheetah still takes orders from families and large households that customer base has shrunk as grocery chains have stabilized, allowing the company to shift focus back to its main clientele, restaurants in need of bulk supply orders.
Moran, who grew up on a turkey farm in Israel and came to the U.S. for college at Cornell University, began her involvement with the startup scene in 2009 when she moved to Silicon Valley and took graduate level computer science classes at Stanford University. She went on to co-found and lead several other restaurant-adjacent fintech startups, including Zappedy, which was acquired by Groupon in 2011, and a payment and commerce platform, Sourcery Technologies, Inc.