Curated Food-Delivery Startup Caviar Raises $15 Million Led By Tiger Global

Caviar, one of many startups that have sprouted up over the past year or so to offer lazy customers an easier way to order meals online, has raised $15 million in seed and Series A funding.

The big difference between Caviar and other food-delivery startups is that it partners exclusively with high-quality restaurants, working with them to enable customers to place orders and ensure that food is delivered fast and fresh when it arrives.

Caviar also enables customers to share a link with their friends or coworkers to facilitate group ordering. For that reason, the service is perfect for office lunch orders or feeding employees around larger events. The service has a high average order size, at around $80 per order. It also has a good retention rate, with 80 percent of orders being placed by repeat customers.

Its $13 million Series A round of funding was led by Tiger Global, which is increasingly making investments in early-stage startups, while the $2 million seed round was led by Winklevoss Capital. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Paul Buchheit, and the Mixt Greens restaurant group.

Caviar plans to use the funding for expansion of its service into new markets. It just entered its fourth city, Washington, D.C., and expects to add a new city each week for the next six weeks or so. That follows availability of service in San Francisco, Seattle and New York City.

In those cities it will face an increasingly competitive marketplace of food-delivery services, thanks in no small part to a large amount of funding going into the space. In recent months, we’ve seen Munchery raise $28 million, Postmates raise $16 million, and Spoonrocket and Sprig each raise about $10 million. It’s unclear whether any of these will grow enough to compete with GrubLess, or are just waiting for the newly public company to pick them up.