Investment Notes: Clove

We are excited to announce that Blackbird has led a US$2.75M pre-Seed round in Clove. 

Clove is a smart platform for creating, sharing and discovering recipes with ease.

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We dream of meeting people like Anna and Sam

Co-founders Anna Guerrero and Sam Killin worked at Canva for nearly the company’s entire history.

In 2014, Anna was Canva’s first growth hire and built the global SEO strategy that grew users from 500K to 10M in 18 months. She then became one the first Canva Product Managers responsible for launching what is now an era-defining strategy in Canva’s Template Library.

Anna established and then oversaw Canva Creators, was part of the decision to add unlimited content in Canva’s Pro subscription, and most recently, led a 500+ person team as VP of Content & Discovery.

Sam was hired in 2015 as Canva’s fifth backend engineer, he designed and scaled multiple core systems, like personalisation and recommendations to learn user preferences based on behaviour, and SEO marketplaces to surface all content in SEO optimised microsites, which remains one of Canva’s main acquisition drivers. 

In short, Anna and Sam have been part of every magical product and revenue decision made at Canva. 

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Recipes in 2023 

Recipe websites worship at the temple of the Google god, overstuffing recipe pages with random life stories, superfluous text and seemingly, everything but the recipe. Each page is ranked by Google on its “uniqueness”, with longer-form pages and time spent on that page used as a proxy for quality, which explains the behaviour.

There has also been a massive platform shift underway, with TikTok, Instagram and YouTube dominating and influencing food-content consumption. The hashtag #food has 615B views on TikTok, and trending dishes are garnering cult following and virality, with 81% of cooks reporting cooking recipes discovered on social media. 

Clove is building the perfect product to integrate this new world of recipe consumption.

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Bringing the Canva philosophy to the cooking world 

With Clove, Anna is bringing the same Canva philosophy (creator community building, beautifully simple products and a free user growth flywheel) to the cooking world.

Beyond getting the recipe unit of the product simply right, Clove’s real value will come in the discovery of new dishes and planning the weekly cooking. Differentiating at the recipe unit level is difficult but a personalised meal plan paired with the value of discovery in this process does offer that opportunity.

For example, in the health and fitness world, clients of personal trainers and nutritionists pay hundreds of dollars for those tailored meal plans. For Clove, they have the chance to unlock that same vein of consumer demand via their platform.

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Anna and Sam bring a unique combination of well-honed creative thinking, skill and ambition to Clove and we are proud to back them!

This round will accelerate Clove’s upcoming beta launch by continuing to grow the team which, as of December, already consists of new engineers and designers from companies including Amazon Groceries and Milkrun.

If you’re interested in joining this growing team, Anna is actively hiring a Community Manager and Operations Manager.

Are you a home-cook or know any food-content creators? Jump on the waitlist for Clove here!

Niki and Silk, on behalf of Blackbird