Video is big. Video of food is particularly big.
Eat Up! Tastemade Raises $40 Million More for Its Video Food Empire.
Goldman Sachs leads the round.
Tastemade via YouTube
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
So here’s a big round of funding for a food video company: Tastemade has raised $40 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs, as well as earlier investors that include Comcast*, Redpoint, Raine and Scripps.
Tastemade co-founder Larry Fitzgibbon declined to comment when I asked him if any of the new funding involved secondary sales, so I’m going to take that as a yes; Tastemade has previously raised another $40 million.
Tastemade, co-founded by three former executives from Demand Media, launched three years ago, and the pitch was pretty straightforward: It wanted to be a digital version of the Food Network (note that Tastemade investor Scripps owns most of that cable channel).
When Tastemade started, it was one of many startups focused on distributing video on YouTube. But in the last year it has been able to grow by moving its clips to additional platforms, most notably Facebook and Snapchat, where it programs one of the app’s “Discover” channels.
Tastemade says it now has a 100 million viewers watching a billion clips a month; Fitzgibbon says Facebook has been the primary growth driver for the company, but also pointed to Brazil, which he says now accounts for 20 percent of the company’s views.
Here’s a Tastemade video about beef ribs. Mmmm. Beef ribs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUbuyZvCD7M
* Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, which owns this site.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
