Plate Up closes nearly £500K seed round, oversubscribing target
What's the deal? Plate UpDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a free recipe-to-shop app that lets users pick meals and order ingredients from supermarkets in minutes, has closed a nearly £500,000 funding round — oversubscribing its £400,000 target in six weeks. The London-based startup attracted investors including Roger Burnley, former chief executive officer of AsdaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →; Mukid Chowdhury, chief executive officer of Trading 212; and Michael Hughes, chief executive officer of the OCU GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
Founder Conor Boyle, 42, left his career as a City project finance lawyer in 2021 to build the app. He bootstrapped the company to a minimum viable product before raising outside capital.
Celebrity chefs also joined the round as both investors and brand ambassadors, including Thom Bateman (4.1 million social media followers), food waste advocate Martyn Odell, BBC Masterchef star Dean Edwards, and health coach James Wythe. Zoe Collins, former managing director of the Jamie Oliver Group, has come on board as a creative and commercial adviser.
Why now? Plate Up says it has more than 50,000 registered users and over 10,000 monthly active users, with thousands joining each month. The company has begun generating revenue and views itself as a disrupter in a market dominated by subscription-based recipe boxes and uninspiring supermarket shops.
Rising food costs and time pressures across UK households have sharpened demand for tools that simplify home cooking without adding expense.
What could go wrong? The app's free model depends on strategic partnerships with retailers and brands to sustain itself — a revenue approach that can be fragile if partners pull back. Competition is fierce: subscription recipe boxes, supermarket meal kits, and AI-powered meal planners are all vying for the same stressed-out home cooks.
Plate Up currently offers delivery only through Sainsbury's and Tesco, limiting its reach to those supermarkets' coverage areas.
The signal: Plate Up's ability to oversubscribe at the pre-seed stage — pulling in senior retail and fintech executives as angels — suggests that investor confidence in consumer foodtech is shifting from subscription-heavy models toward frictionless, free-to-use platforms. Classified as an early-growth company on Dealroom, Plate Up's trajectory will hinge on whether its retail partnership revenue model can scale fast enough to justify staying free as its user base — already past 50,000 registrations — continues to climb.
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