an order online and finish cooking at home.  Last week, Providoor announced the appointment of eBay Australia’s managing director Tim MacKinnon as its CEO, and over the next few months, the start-up plans to raise funds from external investors to support its growth.  “Providoor has been cash flow positive to date, but as we expand nationally and potentially internationally, we are looking to raise money [by] early next year,” Mackinnon told Inside Retail.  “We’re kicking [that process] off shortly — there’s plenty to do, but it’s not something that we’re rushing into. We really want to make sure we have the right investors and partners that can help build this into a great brand.” The funds will be used to expand the Providoor team, improve the product from a technology standpoint and invest in marketing to build brand awareness.  “Our ambition is to be a household name with people who love and appreciate great food,” MacKinnon said.  A new way to entertain The first item on MacKinnon’s to-do list when he officially starts at Providoor on December 1 will be to define the various occasions when customers might use the platform.  Because Providoor launched during lockdown, the initial messaging was all about recreating the experience of a high-end restaurant at home when it wasn’t possible to dine out. But now that restaurants are open again, is Providoor still relevant? MacKinnon believes it is.  “It’s actually a great solution for entertaining, particularly [for] younger people who love great food and love having people over,” he said, noting that millennials make up a large portion of Providoor’s user base.  Another occasion is around convenience, when “you’ve just had a tough week and you don’t know what to cook, but you want to have something a little bit elevated, that makes you feel good”. And there are other reasons people might not be able to visit their favourite restaurant in person besides Covid-19.   “You might not have a booking, you might live far away from restaurants, you might not be able to get a babysitter,” he said. “There are a whole bunch of reasons why you can’t necessarily get to a restaurant, and then what are your options to have a great food experience? That’s the problem Providoor solves.”  Improving the user experience The next order of business will be to improve the experience of using Providoor for both customers and restaurants.  “There’s a lot of work to do in just making the experience more convenient,” he said. “Making it even easier to prepare the food and having much simpler instructions, [having] more video content and sharing content about the food and where it’s from.” A key differentiator between Providoor and other meal delivery providers, such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo — besides the type of restaurants available on the platform — is its attempt to recreate the entire dining experience beyond just the food. Restaurants on Providoor include handwritten notes, music playlist recommendations and table-setting tips.  “Little touches to make sure that people feel that hospitality, that experience and that love in the product,” MacKinnon said.  At the same time, he aims to provide more support for restaurants, which typically don’t have a lot of online experience.  “It’s a little bit analogous to when I started at eBay with retailers. They hadn’t really figured out online and how to think about the incrementality of it,” he said.  Where to next While there’s still a lot of work to do — and untapped opportunities — in Australia, MacKinnon is already thinking about taking the brand overseas.   “We see Australia as being very innovative in the food scene, and this is an innovation that’s come out of Australia that we haven’t seen a similar model in other markets,” he said. However, he’s not ready to share Providoor’s recipe for expansion just yet.  “We think there are a lot of cities — we’re thinking of it more as cities than countries — that have appealing dynamics like Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane,” he said, “but we haven’t finalised which ones.”