That’s why we led Linecook’s $3.3M pre-seed funding round, backing Nick Stewart and Nick Kafker alongside Burst Capital, Sweet Spot Capital and the founders of Strava, WHOOP, and MyFitnessPal.
We invested in their vision because the social layer around cooking has always been thin. Most cooking is shared on generic social platforms, where it gets buried under everything else, and most cooking apps are glorified recipe books. But people don’t just want to share their creations into the void or create an endless list of recipes. They want to get better, learn from cooks they trust, and share the work they are so proud of with the people who care most.
Over the years, every serious hobby has built its own home online for similar reasons. Letterboxd for film. Goodreads for books. Strava for running and cycling. These are communities where people who care about the same thing track their progress, find each other, and feel part of something bigger.
In the case of Strava, they won by turning a solitary activity into a shared identity, with progress to track, effort to celebrate, and a community to belong to. It now has more than 150 million users and is expected to IPO this year at a multi-billion valuation. The opportunity is massive when you own the social layer of a daily personal habit.
Linecook is bringing that model to the kitchen. Home cooks capture what they make, turn it into a post and a recipe, follow the cooks they trust, and build a record of their progress over time. The unit that matters is the meal you actually made, with the substitutions, the story, the plating, and the next person who wants to cook it.
Cooking is a unique category because it touches so many durable behaviors at once. It’s creative and repetitive, social and personal, tied to both health and identity. It’s also high frequency, which is what gives the social and motivational loops room to work. Few activities sit at that many intersections, and fewer get repeated several times a week, year after year.
The advances in AI models are what make now the right moment. Logging a meal used to be a chore, and nobody fills out a form after dinner. Now a photo of your meal and prep can become a draft post, a clean recipe, a saved memory, and a bit of coaching. Do that across enough meals and you’ve built something rare. A record of taste, skill, habit, and preference, not just a pile of ingredients.
That’s where Linecook becomes the system of record for home-cooked meals, the discovery engine for what to cook next, and an assistant that understands how you cook because it was there for the meals you made. Each of those gets better the more you cook, which is exactly the kind of compounding loop that makes Strava hard to leave.
The opportunity to build this product, and why it makes sense to build now, was clear. But we backed Linecook because it is hard to imagine a team better suited for this challenge. Nick and Nick, affectionately referred to as “the Nicks,” are lifelong friends, passionate home cooks, and second-time founders who sold their first company, Recover Athletics, to Strava. They then spent years there building the core subscription product and helping scale Strava into the giant it is today. Nobody understands the playbook that turned Strava into a daily habit better than they do. They’ve built this kind of company once. Now they’re doing it again, in a category they love.
We also think this matters even more in the world we are moving into. As more of the internet becomes AI-generated slop, real human talent, taste, and community will become more important and more rewarded. The things people actually make, the skills they build over time, and the communities they form around shared passions will stand out more clearly.
Cooking is the perfect place for that to happen. It is deeply human, highly personal, and endlessly creative. Linecook gives home cooks a place to capture that work, improve at it, share it, and get recognized for it.
We could not be more excited to partner with Nick, Nick, and the Linecook team as they build the home for everyone who loves to cook. Linecook’s launch resonated with millions of home cooks in March, and as of this week you can now download the app in the App store.
Let’s cook!
