Some consolidation in the world of subject-specific search and social networks, as a legacy player from the world of white goods makes a play for a wider audience. The Whirlpool Corporation — the world’s largest home appliance maker, founded back in 1911 — has acquired Yummly, a visual and semantic recipe search engine and aggregator with 20 million users, which also let you create shopping lists and (in some locations) order food for delivery and equipment to make a meal.
Terms of the deal, which was announced without much fanfare earlier this week — were not disclosed. Publicly-traded Whirlpool is a $14 billion business with revenues last year of $20.7 billion, and it said the deal would have no material impact.
For some context, Yummly was last valued at $100 million when it last raised, $15 million in 2015. Since being founded in 2009 by David Feller and Vadim Geshel, Yummly had raised just under $23 million, according to CrunchBase, with investors including Bauer, First Round, Harrison Metal, Intel Capital, Physic Ventures and Unilever Ventures.
Yummly plans to stay in its offices in Redwood City, California, operating as a subsidiary of Whirlpool, after the deal closes later this month.
The deal is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. It shows how legacy, non-tech companies continue to snap up tech startups to help catapult themselves into the future. And it shows how smaller, but notable, startups focused on specific verticals may opt for these kinds of exits in the face of trying to grow their businesses as independents in a forest of larger trees (in Yummly’s case, the likes of Google and Pinterest).
For Whirlpool, the acquisition is one of many steps that the company has taken over the years to place itself into the current and next-generation of how consumers cook. If you have ever attended or read about the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, you will have probably heard about some of the company’s many efforts in the connected kitchen.
Whirlpool threw its…