Startup Profile

• Founded: 2019

• Core solution: Direct-to-consumer, app-led meal subscription that lets users choose and customize ready-to-eat healthy meal plans delivered on a recurring schedule

• Markets served: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and the UK

• Funding rounds:

  • Seed: $13.5M (December 2021)

  • Pre-Series A: $13M (December 2022)

  • Series B: $25M (December 2024)

  • Series B extension: $39M (July 2025)

• Total Funding Received: $90.5M

• Growth outlook: Calo’s growth roadmap provisions a potential Saudi IPO in 2027

  
  

What does Calo do?

Calo runs a direct-to-consumer meal subscription offering healthy, custom-made meals managed through a mobile app. The experience starts in the app, where a customer selects a plan based on their goals and eating preferences, then chooses meals from an innovative menu. The meals are prepared by Calo, packaged in ready-to-eat portions, and delivered on a recurring schedule, so customers do not have to plan recipes, buy ingredients, or portion food each day. Calo operates a vertically integrated model with its own kitchens and delivery operations keeping the full chain, from production to last-mile delivery, under one operating model.

How was Calo built?

Calo was established to solve a specific gap in the market: people wanted to eat in line with a goal, but the tools available either required daily effort or delivered inconsistent results. Traditional meal delivery tends to be built for one-off orders, while meal planning apps assume users will shop, cook, portion, and repeat. Subscriptions sit in the middle, and that is where most models break. If meals arrive late, quality varies, or the menu stops fitting the customer, then adherence drops and churn follows.

Calo’s competitive edge came from treating the subscription itself as the product, not just the app interface. The company built an operations-led model designed to make repeat delivery dependable. That meant controlling the physical layer that determines whether a customer stays subscribed: menu planning, ingredient sourcing, kitchen production, packaging, delivery routing, and customer service when something goes wrong. The point of owning more of the chain was consistency. 

Technology supports that operating model rather than replacing it. The mobile app is where customers set their goal, select preferences and exclusions, choose meals, and manage the plan. Personalization is treated as retention, because the more precisely meals fit the customer’s objective and tastes, the less likely they are to drop out after a few weeks. 

How did Calo grow?

Calo’s early years were defined by proving demand while building operational muscle in parallel. In its founding year, the company positioned its subscription model as a response to the region’s health challenges, arguing that what was missing was not choice, but an everyday system people could actually stick to. By late 2021, Calo backed that approach with a $13.5 million seed round and continued building the operating capacity needed to repeat the service reliably, not just attract first-time orders.

From there, Calo’s growth became most legible through expansion decisions and operating output. The business broadened across GCC markets, with Saudi Arabia emerging as a major growth engine, and by the time it announced its Series B in December 2024, Calo reported delivering more than 10 million meals in 2024 across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. Around the same period, Calo reported revenue growth close to 100%, reinforcing the idea that the subscription model was compounding as it moved market to market.

The December 2024 Series B also marked a shift in emphasis from regional footprint alone to building operations that could be repeated beyond the GCC. In 2025, that shift took a more direct form through acquisition-led expansion. Instead of launching from scratch in the UK, Calo acquired Fresh Fitness Food and Detox Kitchen, then focused on integrating operations and technology. The integration was completed before marketing ramped up, and Calo said it integrated the UK platforms without layoffs, treating consolidation and consistency as the first priority before pushing for new customer volume.

How did the ecosystem enable Calo’s growth?

For Calo, Bahrain functioned as a fast operational test loop. The distance between the product and the customer was short in a literal sense, with compact geographies and short delivery runs. It was also short in a commercial sense, with feedback arriving quickly after each delivery. That made it easier to iterate on the details that decide whether a subscription holds up, including menu rotations, portion consistency, packing accuracy, delivery routing, and customer support resolution when something arrives late or wrong. As subscription behaviour repeats weekly, the team could see retention signals quickly and adjust the operational system while the learning cycle was still tight.

Bahrain also works as a practical operating environment for an execution-heavy model. When a business depends on daily kitchen production and predictable last-mile delivery, the early challenge is not demand generation alone. It is whether the full chain can run reliably every day. A smaller market reduces the number of moving parts at once, so Calo could standardise how meals were produced, how quality checks were handled, and how routes were managed before expanding into larger markets.

As Founder Ahmed AlRawi puts it, "Bahrain was the ideal place to pilot our MVP and scale from 0-1 and then 1-100. We were able to launch incredibly fast, managing logistics was easier, and word of mouth did magic for us in our go to market strategy. That operating playbook became the foundation for scaling city by city across the GCC."

This operating environment is reinforced by ecosystem-wide support from Tamkeen for enterprise and human capital development, contributing to smoother transitions from early execution to scalable operations for execution-heavy models such as Calo’s.

The Bottom Line

Calo’s story is built on consistent repeatability rather than hype. The company moved from a tight operating loop in Bahrain to a multi-market GCC footprint, using funding rounds as moments to strengthen the system that makes subscriptions stick. The UK entry through its acquisitions added a different kind of expansion marker, with the emphasis placed on integration before volume. Taken together, the through-line is consistent: Calo has grown by turning a daily, execution-heavy service into routines it can replicate across markets without diluting the customer experience. At their current pace and ambitions, Calo is set to put Bahrain on the maps as an internationally recognized brand name.