The Idea
In 2014, David Rabie was an MBA student at Chicago Booth with no time and no good options. Takeaway was fast but grim. Meal kits meant forty minutes of chopping. Frozen food was frozen food. One afternoon he was making dinner across several different appliances and realised something dull and obvious: he was mostly just pressing buttons. A machine could press the buttons.
The insight wasn't a better oven or a better meal kit. It was that neither works alone. If the food arrives already prepped and the oven already knows exactly how to cook it, the whole category of decisions disappears. Hardware and food had to be one product, which is precisely why nobody had done it.
He entered the idea, then called Maestro, into the University of Chicago's New Venture Challenge in 2015 and cooked a live meal on a barely working prototype during the pitch. He won first place and $70,000. Bryan Wilcox, a mechanical engineering PhD, joined as co-founder and they built early prototypes by buying countertop ovens off Amazon and modifying them.
This was the beginning of Tovala.
The Execution
- January 2016: Tovala announced $500,000 in seed funding, joined Y Combinator's winter batch, and launched a Kickstarter that blew past its $100,000 goal within 24 hours, finishing at roughly $256,000 from more than 1,000 backers.
- July 2017: The oven launched publicly at $399, with three meals a week for $36. At the time Blue Apron had raised $193.8 million to Tovala's $2.1 million across two rounds led by Origin Ventures.
- December 2017: Closed a $9.2M Series A led by Origin Ventures, and acquired Chicago food delivery service Radish to bring meal production in house.
- Autumn 2019: The pricing fix that changed everything. Tovala started bundling the oven into a six-month meal subscription rather than selling it as a $399 upfront hurdle. Revenue tripled in four months and margins improved by 20 percentage points year on year.
- February 2020: Near death. Tovala signed term sheets in late January for a $20M Series B and was due to close on 28 February. The lead fund walked as the pandemic hit, leaving the company with three weeks of cash. Rabie says there was a five-hour stretch where he was ready to give up, before bridging from existing investors.
- June 2020: Closed the $20M Series B led by Finistere Ventures, with Comcast Ventures, OurCrowd and Rich Products Ventures. Lockdown then did the rest: the business tripled in 2020.
- February 2021: Raised a $30M Series C led by Left Lane Capital, a second round inside six months. Left Lane's Jason Fiedler said pairing a subscription with a connected device gave Tovala retention that was a step change above anything else in food delivery.
- September 2023: The category imploded. Blue Apron, which IPO'd in 2017 at a $1.89 billion valuation, sold itself to Wonder Group for $103 million. Tovala kept shipping.
- February 2026: Signed a long-term lease on a 140,340 sq ft food processing facility in Winfield, Illinois, having delivered more than 45 million meals to date. Ground broke in April.
- Today: Profitable since 2024, doing nine figures in annual revenue by Rabie's own account and growing around 20% a year, with no capital raised since 2022 and under $70M raised in total.
The lesson?
The thing that saved Tovala wasn't a product breakthrough. It was a pricing decision: stop selling a $399 oven, start bundling it into a six-month subscription, and watch revenue triple in four months. Hardware founders obsess over the device. The device was never the hard part. Blue Apron raised nearly three times Tovala's lifetime funding, IPO'd at $1.89 billion, and sold for $103 million. Tovala raised under $70M and now prints cash without investors. Bigger round, smaller business.