Top angels-backed online recipe sharing platform Cucumbertown out of invitation-only mode

CucumberTown Inc., which has launched an online recipe sharing platform Cucumbertown, has added new social features to its product as it comes out of its free to view, but invitation only mode.

Cucumbertown (a literal translation of 'Vellarikkapatanam' in Malayalam to refer to a place where idiots think anything is possible) now allows anybody to signup, publish and share recipes, follow others, post comments and showcase their pictures on the website.

The Bangalore-based startup had secured $300,000 (~Rs 1.7 crore) in seed funding from several angel investors including Sizhao Zao Yang, co-creator of FarmVille (from Zynga), Paul Singh of 500Startups and Naval Ravikant of AngelList, soon after its beta launch in October this year.

"Cucumbertown is now available to the world after a month of beta testing with limited set of cooks and foodies," said its co-founder Cherian Thomas. "It is just a beginning and more social features will follow in the near future."

The site showcases cuisines from different geographies and cultures, including India, US, Europe, China and Mexico, with regional cuisines from Kerala and Tamil being specially showcased.

It's a pre-revenue startup and Thomas said that the company is currently looking to gain more traction. "We haven't fixed on any revenue model yet."

A recipe blogging platform, Cucumbertown allows users to write recipes, build an identity related to food and share their cooking experiments with others, claimed Thomas. "I can't comment on the number of visitors to our website yet, but we have a decent number of users, given that we launched just a month ago," added Thomas, himself a foodie.

Founded by Thomas, a former Zynga employee, and his friend Arun Prabhakar, along with Chris Luscher, partner of Information Architects, a design firm based in Zurich, and Dan Hauk, an American designer, CucumberTown is a recipe-blogging platform by food lovers for other foodies. It showcases various recipes on the website and has filtered them based on their complexity and time required to prepare.

If one wants to cook chicken biryani, all he/she needs to do is enter search for it on the website. The differentiator lies in segregation in terms of ingredients, types and time required to cook the dish. The site also allows ratings of dishes based on cooking experience and the time taken.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)