Okay, this one’s a little surprising: Anova, maker of an automated sous vide cooker, has acquired startup Get Fresh, with Get Fresh CEO Stephen Svajian becoming CEO of Anova.

I wrote about Get Fresh back in 2013 when it was trying to help hardware makers promote their products by connecting them with reviewers. Looking back, Svajian told me that Get Fresh’s approach might have succeeded, but he became “so intensely focused on hardware brands” that he “kind of ignored making it work.”

Instead, Get Fresh became more of “a management services company” and says it worked closely with 15 “early hardware brands,” including Anova. It’s been a successful partnership — Anova raised more than $1.8 million on Kickstarter last year, and it will sell its 200,000th unit sometime this summer. (Hey, people get excited about sous vide, and Anova makes the process “surprisingly simple.”)

At the same time, Anova’s popularity, combined with the fact that it was basically a family-run business, meant that Get Fresh had to do more and more work. Svajian said that at one point, Get Fresh had 72 employees and contractors working on the account.

Ultimately, as Anova’s business grew, it offered to buy Get Fresh and make Svajian CEO, a role he said he was already filling in some ways.

 

“Anova never really had that CEO in place that I worked closely with — it turned out to just be me,” he said. Of course, it helped that “I just had this amazing passion for sous vide.”

 

Get Fresh investors include David Sacks, Jason Calacanis and Jim Patterson. Anova is paying $9.2 million in cash for the acquisition. Svajian said Get Fresh will be shutting down its existing business, with his team also joining Anova.