If you are a foodie looking for recipes and peers who can share in your joy of cooking, then Douguo, an online cookbook app helping users share good food and stories, might just be the service for you.
Douguo secured US$25 million of Series C funding led by Hillhouse Capital at a valuation of US$300 million at the end of last year. The previous rounds were funded by GGV Capital and Shanda Capital.
As a recipe sharing platform, Douguo structuralizes the data contributed by users, allowing them to look up, bookmark or share recipes with friends. It offers recipe recommendations of almost every dimension you can imagine, whether by ingredient, cuisine, cooking device, group of people, or health function. When it’s time to start cooking, users can switch to a “step-by-step” mode to see each step clearly as they progress.
To increase user interaction and stickiness, Douguo allows users to recommend, upload their own recipes or dishes, and join discussion forums of various themes.
In Douguo’s latest 5.3 update, the service added an e-commerce channel to sell fresh groceries, condiments and cookers. Users can either purchase one ingredient or all the ingredients prescribed in a recipe as a package with one click. In addition, the company is also planning to commercialize the service by introducing an ad business and by sourcing recipe data.
Douguo is free, and works on iOS, Android phones and tablets as well as on desktop. It now boasts a recipe library around 400,000 and claims 75 million downloads and 1.7 million daily active users.
Editing by Mike Cormack (@bucketoftongues)