Blue Apron, the rapidly-growing meal-delivery service that achieved unicorn status last year, is scoping out the city for new digs of up to 100,000 square feet.
The three-year-old startup, which delivers recipes and pre-measured ingredients to customers, completed a $135 million Series D round of fundraising in June to catapult it to a $2 billion valuation.
The round made it the third most-valuable tech startup headquartered in New York City, behind WeWork and Vice Media. It went from delivering 1 million meals a month in 2014 to 5 million meals a month last year.
But while the company’s got a big appetite for growth, it’s headquartered out of a kids-meal sized office at 5 Crosby Street in Soho, occupying just over 10,000 square feet.
Blue Apron is now in the market for about 100,000 square feet, looking at places like Downtown Brooklyn and Midtown South. CBRE’s Sacha Zarba, who is leading the search, declined to comment.
Soon after its Series D, Blue Apron CEO Matt Salzberg told TechCrunch that he planned on investing the new funding into scaling the company upward.
“We’re hiring quite extensively,” he said. “We’re hiring in technology. We’re hiring in marketing and fulfillment and operations and purchasing. So that’s a big use of the proceeds.”
While the company’s planned expansion is large, it’s not unprecedented. Back in 2014, the startup signed a lease for a 120,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Jersey City after it outgrew its 20,000-square-foot center in East Williamsburg.
ZocDoc, an online registry of doctors that recently hit a $1.8 billion valuation, is also in the market for more than 100,000 square feet.