Love food? Delicious semantic search engine Yummly has just raised $6M in Series A financing to continue expanding into a complete digital kitchen platform. (Disclosure: Intel Capital is an investor in Yummly.) I'm happy to welcome Physic Ventures and Unilever to the board, and even more excited that the team can start expanding. (Note: Giant gratuitous bacon photo courtesy of Cathy Brooks on Flickr.)
Towards that end, we're looking for great developers, UX designers, researchers, and marketers that have a passion for food. There's a great post by Kevin Fitchard on GigaOm that touches on Yummly's product roadmap:
"Yummly’s core technology, which breaks down recipes and ingredients into raw culinary data, from which it extracts everything from calorie and saturated fat content to more conceptual notions of saltiness, sourness or bitterness. If it knows you’re a vegetarian, the Yummly search engine will weed out recipes that contain an ingredient that once walked, flew or swam.
"...[CEO Dave] Feller said that the semantic technology Yummly has built has a lot more potential than the search engine lets on. Its current staff of 10 just doesn’t have the resources to build new products to tap into that potential. So Yummly plans to use its new $6 million to go on hiring spree and roll out new cooking applications and features. Some of those products will be the typical tablet apps and shopping list services we see proliferating on cooking sites and services today, but others will make more specific use of the vast food vocabulary Yummly has spent two years learning.
"Feller said Yummly first needs to build upon its core search engine, which he characterized as being more a proof-of-concept –- though it's a proof-of-concept that gets 4 million unique visitors a month. It currently aggregates more than 600,000 recipes from 15 sites, ranging from the Food Network to AllRecipes, but it will expand its scope into further culinary corners of Web."
As someone who loves to cook, I'm a happy user (you can find me under "tribal kitchen goddess") and eager to see the company's deep understanding of food extended into other services and across additional platforms. Can you help? Check out their jobs page and join the kitchen brigade!
