Who we are

A small group of cooks, diners, and engineers who think the table is worth defending.

We started Barter Kitchen because a meal cooked at home is one of the last unmediated transactions left. There is no app between you and the person setting the table. There is no rating, no tip, no algorithm picking who sits where. The cook decides who eats. The diner decides what they bring.

The platform is a bulletin board, not a restaurant. We exist to make introductions safer than a stranger ringing a doorbell, and quieter than a marketplace. We verify identities by hand. We share the cook's address only after both sides have agreed. We do not pass money between people, and we do not take a cut, because the moment someone is paying for a meal it stops being a barter and starts being a restaurant.

We are small on purpose. Reviews are slower than they would be at scale. Our policies are stricter than they would be at scale. Both of those tradeoffs are intentional — they keep the room a room.

If you would like to support the work, the donate page explains how. If you would like to host or to sit at someone's table, the sign-up page is where it starts. We'll write back.

Who's working on it

A small group. Most of us have built and run things before — companies, operations, products, and the kinds of platforms people actually trust to do something at their kitchen table.

Francesca Delisle

Co-Founder & Chief Executive

Francesca has spent twenty-plus years building businesses, including multi-million-dollar ones, and leading teams across the country. She drives the vision for Barter Kitchen — what the platform is, who it's for, and the line we won't cross to grow it faster.

Marilyn Gomez

Chief Operating Officer

Twenty-five years running operations for multi-million-dollar companies, plus a decade of starting, running, and successfully exiting her own. Background in insurance and securities, and years of coaching small-business owners. Marilyn keeps the day-to-day machinery honest — verifications, support, the things that have to be reliable for any of this to feel safe.

Ilse Funkhouser

Chief Product & Technology Officer

Master's in Data Science. A decade founding and leading technical teams — sole technical founder at ProdPerfect, head of AI engineering at Careerspan, currently CTO at Science to People. She owns the product and the engineering for Barter Kitchen, including the rule that AI is here to help humans, not replace them. Based in Portugal, remote-first.