CookUnity Hits $750 Million ARR, Unlocking Chefs’ Brick-and-Mortar Dreams |
CookUnity Hits $750 Million ARR, Unlocking Chefs’ Brick-and-Mortar Dreams
Meal delivery startup, CookUnity, grew its revenue 70 percent in 2025, helping fan favorite chef Aarthi Sampath open her own restaurant.
BY CHLOE AIELLO, REPORTER @CHLOBO_ILO
Cook Unity founders Clara Quiroga and Mateo Marietti. Photography by Amir Hamja
Aarthi Sampath isn’t your typical celebrity chef. Sampath, who emigrated from India to the U.S. to continue her culinary education, spent close to a decade honing her craft in Michelin-starred restaurants and then gained fame on Food Network competition shows. She had a food truck in Seattle selling “fast fine” grain bowls that folded after about a year, a venture she admits may have been “a little ahead of its time.” Then she found CookUnity, the chef-to-home meal delivery startup.
Sampath joined the platform in 2023, and last year, her Indian cuisine, featuring such dishes as a seasonal corn malai curry, was among the fastest-growing on the platform, surging 114 percent year-over-year. To meet demand, she now oversees a team of more than 50 people across New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago.
In April, she’ll open Dravida, a casual, but elevated 50-seat restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood with cuisine inspired by the South Asian and Indian diaspora. It’s the fulfillment of a long-held dream. “This idea was so unique, most investors were like, ‘Okay, no. Can you not do just a regular Indian restaurant?” Sampath says. “I’m so grateful that CookUnity gave me the opportunity to become an entrepreneur first.”
An exclusive ARR milestone
CookUnity, a two-time Inc. 5000 honoree just achieved a milestone of its own: Inc. can exclusively report that the company hit $750 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) last year. In 2024, its annual revenue was $350 million.
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“Our main competitive advantage is the chefs,” says Clara Fernandez Quiroga, CookUnity’s co-founder and chief business officer, who immigrated to the U.S. in 2016 from Argentina with her husband, CookUnity’s co-founder and CEO, Mateo Marietti. “The chefs have always been the soul of the company since its inception.”
ARR has become an increasingly popular (and somewhat controversial) metric, often used by AI companies that are reporting breakneck growth. Part of the issue is that there’s no uniform standard for calculating it, inviting questions about whether revenue sources considered “long term” are legitimate.
Indeed, CookUnity does not follow the most common ARR tactic: taking one month’s revenue and multiplying it by 12. To calculate CookUnity’s ARR, the company measures weekly subscriptions and multiplies them by 52. The company’s subscription pricing model was the impetus behind its pivot from reporting annual revenue to using annual recurring revenue as a statistic.