Over the last few years, a number of marketplaces have popped up to enable people who have assets or time to share them with others: There’s Airbnb for hosts who wish to share their apartments with guests who wish to stay there; RelayRides to allow people to share their cars with others who want to rent them; and Lyft to connect drivers with passengers in their cities.
Now there’s Feastly, which provides a marketplace to connect hungry eaters with cooks nearby.
Feastly follows a pretty typical peer-to-peer model: People who are passionate cooks — whether they be professional, semi-professional, or amateur chefs — can list food that they plan to cook and invite eaters to buy a seat at their table during the meal. The goal is to lower the barrier of entry for cooks to enter the marketplace while also making dining more social.
Launched in private beta in January, the platform has seen three-quarters of all cooks host multiple meals. The cost of meals has ranged from free to $150, but the average price tends to be about $35, according to co-founder Noah Karesh. Some chefs have already made thousands of dollars using the platform, even in private beta mode.
For eaters — which the company calls “feasters” — the idea is to offer authentic or exotic foods to try out, as well as those that fit certain dietary lifestyles.
Like other marketplaces that have launched over the last few years, Feastly is making its service available in one market after another. Currently available in San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., the company plans to expand its offering into other cities over time.
To feed that expansion, the company has raised funding from investors that include Tim Draper, Mike Walsh, Scott and Cyan Banister, Lisa Gansky, Adri Capital, and others.