La Belle Assiette Gets $1.7 Million To Scale Up Its On-Demand Chef Service

French startup La Belle Assiette just raised $1.7 million (€1.3 million) from angel investors, such as BlaBlaCar’s Nicolas Brusson, eFounders’ Thibaud Elzière, Nicolas Bourdin, the three founders of l’Atelier des Chefs and Kima Ventures.

As a reminder, with La Belle Assiette, you can browse and find the perfect chef for your lunch or dinner party. He or she will then come with the ingredients and tools to cook at your home or office. You just have to let the chef in your place, and that’s it.

The average booking is for 6 people at $55 (45€) per head. You should consider La Belle Assiette as a great way to bring a fancy restaurant to your home or office.

The service is currently available in France, the U.K., Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. To get new chefs on board, the startup provides everything you need to become an independent chef — calendar management, billing, online presence, etc. Then, La Belle Assiette takes a 12 percent cut.

Back in April, the company had 272 chefs, and it now reports having more than 350 chefs. The company will use the funding to expand and grow. It will need more chefs, more countries and more customers to become a significant player in this space. The most serious competitors, Kitchensurfing and Kitchit, are in the U.S. But it might become more complicated for La Belle Assiette to take over the European markets if they both start expanding to Europe. That’s why expanding more quickly is important.

Overall, this deal is yet another proof that the French tech ecosystem can come up with compelling marketplaces matching customers with services. BlaBlaCar raised a massive $100 million round to create a global long distance ride sharing network.

La Belle Assiette is in no way as advanced as BlaBlaCar — there is still a long and windy road ahead. But the company had proved that there is a market for this kind of services. Now, it needs to scale and grow its revenue, while providing delicious food.