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ezCater Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

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The profile

The Boston office-catering marketplace lost 85% of its revenue at the start of the pandemic and laid off more than 400 of its 900 employees in April 2020.

  • Category: workplace food marketplace
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Deepest-cut ranking company
  • Last updated: 2026-09-29

Pandemic-role map

  • Reader shorthand: office-catering marketplace that lost 85% of its revenue at the start of the pandemic, laid off more than 400 of its 900 employees, and raised $100 million at a $1.6 billion valuation 20 months later.
  • What ezCater did for customers: took online catering orders from businesses and routed them to restaurants and caterers, earning a commission on each order.
  • What broke in the pandemic: offices emptied, and with them the meetings ezCater fed.
  • Relief role: not a lender or relief intermediary; no ezCater borrower appears in SBA's PPP loan data.

Before the pandemic

ezCater, a Boston company whose chief executive is co-founder Stefania Mallett, raised a $150 million Series D-1 round in April 2019, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and GIC, bringing its total funding to $320 million. Its Form D for that round reports $123.0 million sold by April 3, 2019 from 14 investors. The company then described itself as "the world's largest online catering marketplace."

What the pandemic changed

On April 7, 2020, ezCater laid off more than 400 of its 900 employees, the company confirmed to Axios. Its statement: "There is not enough sugar on the planet to sugarcoat this: we're a company that feeds meetings, and meetings are not happening much right now. We were crushing our 2020 plan, until coronavirus hit." The company later put the damage in one number: "an 85% drop in revenue at the beginning of COVID."

Nine days after the layoff, ezCater announced Feed the Front Line, a program that let anyone pay for restaurant meals delivered to hospital workers: $10 for one worker, $300 for a unit, $3,000 for a hospital floor. It said more than 20,000 meals had gone to 145 hospitals in just over a week, and that it was waiving its commission on those orders. Its release cited Black Box Intelligence figures showing restaurant sales down more than 60% and quoted a Boston restaurant owner: "With orders down so much right now, feeding hospitals makes a huge difference to our business."

After the first shock

ezCater says it expanded from feeding one-off meetings to "offering full corporate food solutions." In December 2021 it announced a $100 million Series D-2 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which it said brought total funding to $425 million and its post-money valuation to $1.6 billion, and said it was "exceeding its pre-pandemic revenue run rate." Its Form D reports $103.4 million sold from 18 investors, with a first sale on December 8, 2021. By then its network had grown to 82,000 restaurants, from 78,000 in April 2020.

Where the company is now

ezCater is a private company. Mallett and E. Rodgers are listed as executive officers and directors on its most recent Form D, filed in December 2021.

Sources

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