We're thrilled that existing investors have decided to invest further in Foodity at a substantially higher valuation than our recent seed round. This additional money will help us add staff and technology at a rapid rate and service the needs of major new client's and partners who have come on board in recent weeks.

Almost £150,000 of extra funds will mean that our management team can concentrate on product and projects, and pace themselves as we raise our A-round, expected to be in the order of £2.5m, over the coming few months. We're humbled to have such experienced individuals get behind the team and support us so unequivocally.

We are delighted to have been chosen from over 75 UK start-ups to join BBC Worldwide Labs business accelerator programme. BBC Worldwide, who are the major player in publishing recipe content in the UK have selected six digital media start-ups with good strategic-fit to join them for six-months at BBC Media Centre in White City to work on joint initiatives to the BBC’s benefit and to accelerate the commercialisation of the start-ups’ technologies.

You can read more about the BBC Worldwide Labs initiative here in coverage by CNN/Fortune, in a report that highlights the main appeal of being part of the programme, namely that ‘the startups get a first client worth billions."The BBC can be a great first customer," says BBC Worldwide Labs Head Jenny Fielding. The broadcasting giant can be "a partner at the point of commercialization for these companies."

After a great year based in Clerkenwell Workshops (much of it rent-free as part of the prize package for London's Brightest Stars - see May 2011's news) we're pleased to have moved to the Southbank where our arts loving team will be at home among the galleries, theatres and, er, bars.

We're in a great space above the Old Vic Theatre's offices (yes, that's right we share a building with Hollywood legend Kevin Spacey - no sightings yet though) with the Shard and London Eye providing a dramatic back drop to long days of coding. Perfect.

Foodity was delighted to sponsor the FMCG category at this year's Marketing Week Engage awards, where GSK's Lucozade was the winner in a strong field that included great brands like Cadbury's and Coca Cola. It was a great opportunity to meet the teams behind some of the food brands we admire and to see work by some great brands and their agencies.

We were amazed by the high-spirits some of the winners exhibited - not least agency-on-a-roll 'Adam and Eve' who's representives seemed to be on a spectacular high. The following morning they announced their £60 acquisition by Omnicom, so it seems there was more than just the gongs to celebrate. Congratulations.

We're adding to our team on a nearly weekly basis at the moment, and finding great coders isn't easy when you're competing for talent with all London's other great start-ups. Silicon Milkroundabout is fellow London start-up SongKick's solution: a recruitment weekend held at Truman's Brewery where hundreds of technical and product candidates can chat to the start-ups who take stands.

We took a stand for the first time and of the dozens of great people who swung by our stand we were delighted to talk to sixteen star-quality coders, any of whom we'd be delighted to hire. We're pleased to say that one has already agreed to join us, which means we've added three great developers to our team this month. Result.

We’re pleased to have raised over £250,000 to develop Foodity's platform. The money has come from two sources: friends and family and a group of Angel Investors. Together with the revenues that we already earn from some of the world's biggest food brands and retailers, these funds will let us keep developing our platform while we embark on a much larger fundraising over the coming months.

We're delighted that as well as high net worth investors, the angels involved are some of the smartest people in the fields of consumer engagement, marketing, and data analysis. Having investors who can bring considerable expertise and experience to the team means we'll gain a great deal from their input, but it's also a heartening endorsement to have experts in our field put their money where their mouths are.

We're delighted to announce that one of the smart-money investors who joined our seed round has agreed to take a hands-on role at Foodity, by chairing our advisory board and working closely with our marketing team to ensure that Foodity's tools have maximum marketing impact on behalf or our partners.

Dr Vishal Talwar, who is a Fellow at London School of Economics, is a B2B marketing expert and will help Foodity communicate the benefits of our tools and technologies to the publishers, brands and retailers whose enquiries we're glad to be fielding on a daily basis. We're delighted to have him join the team and expect him to make a major contribution to our growth.

We've just added a new feature to Premier Food's flagship customer engagement site, greatlittleideas.com - it's an interactive meal planner that lets users drag and drop their favourite recipes to a weekly meal plan and then print out a shopping list, or just load all the ingredients at their favourite UK supermarket's webstore, using a clickable shopping list.

We're thrilled to have the UK's biggest food producer by building such a high profile project. Thanks to our simple webservices and framework, deployment required less than a day's integration from Premier Food's own technical team, meaning they got the hassle free, turn-key solution that works with existing user accounts that we promised. Well done team!

January's seen us doing more and more in the US. We now have a presence in New York, with one of our team, Allie, based there. At the same time we've been doing our first work with grocery retailers and packaged grocery brands in the US.

We've been working with one US retailer on a meal planner that uses our recipe API & basket intelligence module to load recipe ingredients at the retailer's webstore (two teams of developers separated by 8 time zones worked to an incredibly tight timetable to ship a product that worked first time - well done guys).

We also built another US flavoured implementation of our SmartBasket technology for a global FMCG manufacturer this month. It loads ingredients at a number of US grocers' websites when users shop from recipes promoting the manufacturers US brands.

We're pleased to welcome Hercules Fisherman to our founding team. He's joining us as a co-founder, and takes responsibility for the development of our data-platform and the processing tools that make it so useful to end-users and to our commercial partners.

Hercules is also investing in Foodity, and will be taking a seat on our board. He joins us fresh from a six-year stint at fizzback, where he was a co-founder and the CTO. He and his co-founders exited the business eight weeks ago, selling to Nice Systems for $80m.

He has exceptional track records in entrepreneurship and technology and we're delighted he's joining us.