A UK ‘tech for good’ company behind a food waste-tackling app with more than 500,000 users has raised a $6 million (£4.56m) series A round.
Founded by Tessa Clarke and COO Saasha Celestial-One, OLIO claims to be the world’s only neighbour-to-neighbour food sharing app.It was launched to tackle the growing problem of food waste by connecting both businesses and individuals with surplus food with anyone living nearby.
The platform has already shared more than 600,000 portions of food in just over two years.
The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with existing backers including Accel, Quadia and ASOS co-founder Quentin Griffiths following on.
New investors joining include Lord Waheed Alli’s Silvergate Investments 2, Bran Investments, Julien Codorniou (Facebook) and Jason Stockwood (Match.com, Simply Business).
The capital injection will be used to double the size of the team, with a particular focus on product, and to expand the company’s “Food Waste Heroes Programme”, which enables retailers, events and corporate canteens to become zero food waste.
“We are absolutely thrilled to be working with the Octopus team to unlock our vision of a world with hundreds of millions of hyper-local food sharing networks, so that our most precious resources can be shared, not thrown away,” Clarke said.
“We are also extremely proud to have closed this round not only as one of a handful of female founded businesses, but also as part of the small but growing group of ‘tech for good’ companies.”
Co-founder & COO Saasha Celestial-One added: “We’ve achieved an incredible amount with a very lean team, and can’t wait for this next stage when we can really start to unlock the true potential of OLIO.”