Global technology and appliance giant Samsung has accelerated its presence in food tech with the acquisition of UK-based food tech platform Whisk.
Founded in 2012, Whisk’s platform uses AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and deep learning to analyze how people around the world interact with ingredients and recipes to help global brands and retailers connect with their consumers on a more meaningful level.
Through its technology, Whisk is able to understand every ingredient in the world; how each interacts with others, its nutritional value, shelf life, cost, and where to buy it.
Tracking more than 100 million user interaction points per month, Whisk partners with some of the top consumer brands, recipe sites, and IoT companies, including Amazon, Walmart, FoodNetwork, General Mills, Nestle, Unilever, McCormick, Tesco, Asda, among others.
Between 2013 and 2014, the company raised $2 million in Seed funding, becoming profitable in 2017. Over the past 12 months, the company has tripled its revenue and expanded its team from 14 to 32, and is now behind more than half a billion recipe interactions per month.
Last year, Whisk announced it had acquired European rival company Avocando, an AI ingredient and food experience platform focusing on Germany and other European markets.
“Whisk is currently focused on the US, UK and Australia and with the acquisition will expand services across Europe,” Whisk noted in company announcement in May of last year. “Together, Germany, France and Spain represent a larger eCommerce grocery market than both the US and UK individually, with the largest online recipe usage per capita figures in the world.”
Whisk first began working with Samsung in 2016, and under the terms of the acquisition deal, it will be integrated with the Samsung NEXT product team – a Silicon Valley-based group dedicated to creating “software and services businesses, and platforms to improve the way people work and live”.
“We first started working with Samsung in the UK back in 2016, and quickly saw the unique opportunity to further scale and strengthen our platform with one of the most successful companies in the world,” said Nick Holzherr, Whisk founder and CEO, in a company blog post announcing the acquisition. “Now, together, we have the potential to power experiences all around the world.”
Samsung has expressed its intention for further investment in Whisk with an eye toward global expansion, stating, “We will continue investing in Whisk to build a world-class product, work with partners to deliver even more value, and enable the team to scale with the help of our expertise and resources.”
-Lynda Kiernan