CookUnity Wants to Be Your Last Food App: Mateo Marietti and the Making of CookUnity

Everyone said the marketplace model was broken. CookUnity Co-Founder and CEO Mateo Marietti thought they were just scared.

There was a time when the venture capital consensus grew skeptical of marketplace businesses. They were considered too capital-hungry and too hard to defend at scale. CookUnity Co-Founder and CEO Mateo Marietti, however, didn't flinch.

It wasn't his first time doubling down on a model others doubted. Raised on a farm in Argentina, Marietti went on to build companies at the crossroads of food and technology. He co-founded Sushi Pop, which grew into one of the largest food delivery platforms in Latin America, and opened Peruvian-Asian fusion and traditional Argentinian restaurants across Buenos Aires. The ventures earned him recognition as Argentina's CEO of the Year by Vistage Worldwide and a spot on Forbes Argentina's 35 Under 35 list.

By the time Marietti co-founded CookUnity in New York in 2015, he'd already spent a decade learning what breaks at scale in food. The businesses he built across two continents had delivered over 25 million meals combined. He'd already built and broken marketplace models before anyone was watching.

While founders pivoted to SaaS or AI wrappers, he kept building. CookUnity is now approaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, growing at 55% year-over-year, with gross margins above 53% and EBITDA-positive operations in its core markets. So what did he see that others missed?

"The model didn't collapse," he says. "It just got harder. And ‘harder’ filters out who can actually execute."

The classic chicken-and-egg problem of marketplaces has always required capital to solve, and capital is no longer cheap. But instead of abandoning the model altogether, Marietti’s response was to rethink its boundaries.

CookUnity doesn't leverage idle assets the way Airbnb does, nor does it own infrastructure outright. It sits somewhere between a pure marketplace and a vertically integrated operator, a hybrid position that, in the early days, might have looked like indecision.

"Don't be dogmatic about purity," he underscores. "Amazon has fulfillment centers. That didn't stop it from being Amazon."

Starting With Supply

CookUnity insisted on investing in supply, specifically in chefs, at a time when it would have been easier to focus elsewhere. The thesis required patience: attract the best chefs, get the best food, grow the audience. But getting the flywheel moving required believing in the model before the data was there to confirm it.

"Supply turned out to be the easier side," Marietti says. "Once the chefs tried the platform and saw the earnings, they stayed. Word spread, and a waitlist formed pretty quickly."

That dynamic has since tipped dramatically. CookUnity's roster has grown from a small group of New York cooks to over 200, and the pedigree of recent additions signals a genuine inflection point. José Andrés recently finalized terms to join. Francis Mallmann is on board. Babish, with over 10 million YouTube subscribers, signed, too. In 2026 alone, the platform added 20 million combined followers across its active chef roster.

"Chefs of this caliber bring audiences," he says. "Cultural capital is a genuine moat. It compounds slowly and is nearly impossible to replicate quickly."

This Was Always About Health

The marketplace, it turns out, was never the destination.

"I've been sitting with a specific observation for years," Marietti points out. "In the U.S., roughly 70% of the population is overweight. Fewer than one in 20 have good metabolic health. That's not new. What's new is that people are no longer passive about it."

For the first time, a meaningful and growing segment of consumers is actively reaching for tools to close the gap between how they eat and how they want to feel. The numbers bear him out. Wearable device adoption among US adults climbed to 36% in 2022, up from around 28% just three years earlier, and that was before the current wave of smart rings, continuous glucose monitors, and AI-powered health apps reshaped the category. Today, roughly 35% of US adults use a wearable health device, and 40% use health apps, as well.

Meanwhile, 52% of Americans say they followed a specific diet or eating pattern in 2023, with calorie counting, clean eating, and high-protein diets leading the way. The market underpinning all of this is enormous: the global wearable technology market was estimated at nearly $93 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $230 billion by 2033. The infrastructure of personal health monitoring has already moved from niche to mainstream.

And yet most food platforms are still optimized for convenience and price.

"That's the gap I always wanted CookUnity to fill," he says. "But sequencing matters. You can't build a credible health platform without supply density first. You can't personalize to someone's metabolic goals if you only have twenty meals to choose from."

The marketplace, the flywheel, the years of chef recruitment, all of it was foundation for a promise that can only now be credibly made. CookUnity recently launched an AI nutritionist that tracks goals, past orders, and biometric context. Integrations with Oura and MyFitnessPal are in progress. Early data shows customers engaging with health-focused collections staying significantly longer, and UnityPass is projected to lift retention by more than 30%.

"Flavor and health used to feel like opposing bets," Mateo says. "They're the same bet, just made at different time horizons."

The infrastructure reflects a business being sized for something much larger: 600,000 square feet of production capacity, with another 500,000 in development, a Manhattan retail storefront opening in early 2027, and a B2B arm scaling at 5x year-over-year with 115% net revenue retention. The longer arc is what Mateo calls the world's first Food API: a platform where any creator can execute a recipe at scale, and any eater can find exactly what they need.

It's an ambitious frame. Then again, so was betting on the marketplace model when many others were walking away from it.