The Dragons said no. In 2013 Timo Boldt and James Carter stood in front of the investors on the BBC's Dragons' Den and left without a deal. Gousto was a year old. Today it makes more than £340m a year.
Boldt had not planned this life. He grew up with entrepreneurship at the edges of his family, because his godparents had started several companies and he admired the lives they led. He studied between Germany and the US, then moved to London in 2008. He worked as an analyst at Rothschild, then as a vice president at the hedge fund Petrus Advisers. Four years into finance, he left.
What he wanted was different. He told startups.co.uk he wanted to do something that had a positive impact on people and the planet, and he tied food waste, health and convenience together as the idea. Meal kits were new in the UK, and HelloFresh was the main competitor. Gousto launched on 12 April 2012.
The television rejection did not stop it. In December 2015 the company raised £9m from the Business Growth Fund, MMC Ventures, Unilever and the Angel Co-Fund. Another £10m followed in 2016, the year Boldt was named IGD's Young Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2019 came £18m with fitness coach Joe Wicks among the backers, then £30m from Perwyn, and £33m in April 2020 as lockdown made cooking at home a national habit.
The bill arrived in 2022. Post-pandemic inflation hit sales, and a business that had been valued at £1.4bn that year raised money in February 2023 at under £250m, about 80% lower. Sky News described a governance storm. The company cut jobs and aimed for profit.
It got there. For FY2025 Gousto reported revenue of £342m and adjusted EBITDA of £45m, its third consecutive year of underlying profitability. Then in September 2026 came the news that Boldt would step down as CEO after 15 years.
The quiet lesson is in the order of things. The investors who said no on television were not wrong about the difficulty; the business needed years and several rounds before it paid. Boldt kept the idea he started with, a better dinner at home, and let the money catch up with it. Rejection in public is rarely the end; it is just one sample, like a bin with three bottles in it.