Tovala

I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and wanted to start a company my entire life. Bryan developed an interest in entrepreneurship when he first started reading PG during his PhD program. We met in 2015 when Bryan was running a product development firm and I was considering hiring his firm to build our early prototypes. Bryan decided to take the leap and offer to join as co-founder and we were off to the races. The company got started a little before that when I was a graduate student at Chicago Booth cooking for myself one day, using multiple appliances and taking 2+ hours to make an ordinary meal — and thinking that all these appliances could be automated. After a lot of customer research, it became clear that cooking was just one part of the journey to get a meal on the table and that if we wanted to deliver on the holy grail of quality and convenience, we had to control the full end-to-end experience from shopping to prepping to cooking to cleaning. Thus, Tovala was born.

YC turned Bryan on to entrepreneurship so he was gung ho about YC from the moment we partnered up together. After talked to a couple alums and a couple people that worked at YC, they made it very clear to us that it was a no brainer to apply. And I’m glad we did.Our experience applying and interviewing is one I won’t forget. I remember interviewing with Michael and Carolyn and Michael sending us down a rabbit hole of building a full size oven. Glad we didn’t do that 😂 . Going through the batch was fun. It was nice to have a cohort of people doing the same thing at the same stage. Wish I had more of that now, but there just aren’t as many companies of our size/stage around, in particular in Chicago. Fundraising was harder than we expected at demo day. Apparently people are scared of hardware + food companies. It took us 2 months to raise our seed round, but we did it eventually and things ultimately worked out.