Tokyo-based online recipe network Cookpad has acquired Cucumbertown, an Indian recipe sharing startup which lets food lovers create customised blogs to share their food experiences and recipes. While no financials have been revealed, the deal is speculated to be over $1 Million.
With this acquisition, the company’s investors – Helion Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures will exit the company. However, the founders of the website will continue working.
Cucumbertown was launched in October 2012 by Cherian Thomas and Arun Prabhakar. It raised $3,00,000 in seed funding from a bunch of angel investors. After that, it raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding round from Helion Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures.
As per the current acquisition deal terms, CucumberTown will remain an independent subsidiary under Cookpad. This acquisition will enable Cucumbertown to scale to international markets and monetize their business.
It is working on revenue sharing model to the users, similar to the YouTube Creator model. The service is being rolled out to food bloggers through which they can customize their food blogs with themes and custom domains.
Commenting about the deal, Cucumbertown’s co-founder, Cherian Thomas, said,
Food blogging is a highly lucrative source of livelihood. But at the moment, it’s very fragmented and the blogger needs to understand too many intricacies of monetisation to earn something substantial. We hope to change that and make it a level-playing field for anyone who wants to be a food blogger. The first step towards this was the release of the RecipeWriter — a editor focussed on just food blogging.
Cookpad is a $2 Billion market cap recipe network, founded in 1997 by Akimitsu Sano and Yoshiteru Akita. The platform allows users to upload and search through user-created recipes.
Cookpad claims to have over 50 million users and more than 2 million registered recipes. And the company has been on a series of acquisitions lately. Last year, Cookpad acquired English language app Allthecooks, Mis Recetas site in Spanish, Dapur Masak in Malay and Lebanon’s NetSila.
