The Idea
Mateo Marietti grew up on a farm in Argentina, where milk came from the cow and meat meant slaughtering an animal. When the family moved to Buenos Aires in the early 1990s, the supermarket aisle landed like a foreign language: everything packaged, most of it processed. Inc
He took a graduate job at Maersk, decided the corporate track wasn't for him, and left to build Grupo Pop, a bootstrapped delivery-only food company that grew to 100,000 deliveries a month across four countries. It worked. It also convinced him the model was structurally broken. Restaurants couldn't scale past their own four walls, and the chefs actually making the food captured almost none of the value. Pmf
In 2016, he and his wife Clara Quiroga moved from Argentina to New York with a plan and not much else: no network, no US credibility, no experience raising capital. The bet was simple. Give great chefs kitchens, ingredients, logistics and software, and they'd build businesses no single restaurant could ever support. Inc
This was the beginning of CookUnity.
The Execution
- 2016: CookUnity launched in Brooklyn as an on-demand service, hot food in 30 minutes. Marietti did the deliveries himself for a year. The best customers turned out to be bankers and lawyers expensing dinner late at night.
- Early 2018: The on-demand business reached $2M in revenue through Seamless. Then Marietti spotted a handful of customers ordering four to ten meals at a time and stacking them in the fridge. He shut the entire business down and restarted at zero revenue with a weekly subscription and a four-meal minimum.
- 2018 to 2019: The first Los Angeles launch died three months in and the team retreated to New York to conserve cash. The company ran out of money more than once. Marietti stopped taking a salary and put his own money into the business while New York chefs kept telling him "maybe next year".
- 2020: Covid closed the restaurants and the maybes turned into yeses. Esther Choi, Einat Admony and Marc Forgione signed up, and the platform grew 10x over 18 months.
- January 2021: Fuel Venture Capital led a $15.5M Series A, the first institutional money in five years of trading.
- September 2021: Insight Partners led a $47M Series B, taking total funding to $70M and paying for kitchens in Atlanta, Miami and Seattle. The network could now reach nearly 90% of the US population.
- 2024: Revenue hit $350M across 180 chefs and eight kitchens, with the average chef earning roughly $800,000 a year and top sellers clearing $5M to $6M.
- November 2025: After growing meals more than 75% year on year without raising equity since 2021, CookUnity took up to $250M in non-dilutive capital from General Catalyst. A month later it acquired flavrs, a shoppable-video platform, to bolt a TikTok-style feed onto the ordering flow.
- January 2026: The first move off its own platform. Chef meals went live inside Airbnb Services across 22 US statesand DC, from $15 a meal, no subscription required.
- Today: Marietti says the business is running at $750M ARR and growing around 70% a year. In June the Yankees named CookUnity their official meal delivery partner, putting 60+ New York chefs into the stadium's premium suites.
The lesson?
Marietti's best decision was deleting $2M of revenue. The on-demand business worked, it just worked for the wrong customer: bankers expensing dinner with money that wasn't theirs. The four-meal orders sitting in someone's fridge were a much quieter signal, and the only one that mattered. Most founders defend the revenue they already have. The ones who compound go hunting for the customers already misusing the product, and rebuild the company around them. The $2M wasn't the business. It was the tuition.