Japanese recipe portal Cookpad acquired Lebanese cuisine website Shahiya for $13.3 million last week. While is not a lot compared to Silicon Valley's headlines of Instagram being acquired for $1 billion or Whatsapp being acquired for $22 billion, the deal is being lauded as a landmark in the region as it is the first exit of a Middle Eastern start up.
The cooking website boasts over 3 million monthly users, 90% of whom are women. With user-created recipes in Arabic and English, Shahiya offers thousands of versions of Middle Eastern dishes. Although the website's creators are Lebanese, three AUB graduates, the site has a strong reach in the region, with over 1 million monthly users in Saudi Arabia alone. In addition to the website, there is also an application for mobile use.
Aiming to be closer to a virtual cookbook with user interaction and comments, than a chat room with untested dishes, the website has a team of nutritionist that test each posted recipe for accuracy. They also developed an algorithm that determines fat, cholesterol and calories in each dish.
Middle East Venture Partners invested $500,000 in Shayiha in 2013, and at Lebanon's Accelerate 2014 Conference, MEVP Managing Partner Walid Hanna spoke about the large return on investment for the venture capital firm and how this deal will allow MEVP to continue investing in start ups in the region. This is the firm's first acquisition to exit.
"We have always known that Shahiya's future should be aligned with such a global player," says Shahiya Cofounder and CEO Hala Labaki in a statement. "Like Cookpad, we obsess over our users and the simplicity of our offering, and look forward to expanding and doing more for our community."
The website Cookpad has been acquiring international food websites around the world including Mis Recetas from Spain and DapurMasak from Indonesia .
Accelerators are being founded all over the region while individual countries are showing increased interest in fostering start up ecosystems in the Middle East. Start up success stories like Shahiya are essential to continuing this growth.