Sweetgreen Salad Chain Gets Tossed $18.5M

Sweetgreen, a D.C.-based salad chain, has announced that it has raised $18.5 million in Series E funding, led by Revolution Growth and with participation from chefs Danny Meyer and Daniel Boulud. This is on top of $22 million in funding raised in December of last year.

The new capital will be used to fuel their expansion, with a particular focus on adding restaurants in the Los Angeles area. Sweetgreen currently has 27 East Coast locations.

“People really want healthy on-demand and affordable great food,” Evan Morgan, a partner at Revolution Growth, says. The firm sees “many opportunities to continue to grow this brand."

Sweetgreen provides organic and local food from regional farmers. The brand is committed to serving fresh and healthy food with its farm-to-table approach.

This is not the only food investment for Revolution, which was started by AOL co-founder Steve Case. The firm also has a project, Revolution Foods, which aims to provide healthy meals for schoolchildren.

“Revolution wasn’t started to be a food investment company,” Morgan says, but the team felt that Sweetgreen was a “special concept.”

In general, there has been a significant rise in food-related investments by venture capitalists in recent years, expanding their reach beyond science and technology. Yet although most of the investments center around an app or website, Sweetgreen is primarily a brick-and-mortar store.

Morgan suggests that Sweetgreen could eventually have 1,000 locations, throughout the United States. The company was founded in 2007 by Jonathan Neman, Nathaniel Ru and Nicolas Jammet.