Miki Kuusi, CEO and co-founder of Wolt.
Wolt
Wolt, a food delivery app that has expanded to groceries and retail, has raised $ 530 million as it tries to tackle Amazon.
The funding round in the six-year company was led by ICONIQ Capital, which has also invested in Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba and Zoom. It brings the total investment in the company to $ 856 million. Wolt, who has not disclosed its latest appraisal, said it will use the money to “go beyond restaurants.”
Miki Kuusi, who founded Wolt in Helsinki in 2014, told CNBC: “Our mission is to empower local restaurants and other brick-and-mortar operators to have the tools to provide their local customers with a better e-commerce experience than anything else. their huge foreign competitors can do that today. “
He added, “We are very confident that the next wave of ecommerce will be the standard from same week, same day delivery to delivery within the next 30 minutes. our markets, starting with the restaurant. ”
Fast growth
When Wolt launched in Helsinki in 2015, it only had 10 restaurants on its platform and a small handful of downloads. In 2016 Wolt had about 100,000 app users and 450 restaurants.
Today Wolt has more than 10 million users in 129 cities in 23 countries. It claims to have 27,000 restaurant and retail partners, 50,000 couriers and 2,000 employees.
While Amazon is huge in the US and many other countries, it is not that well established in some corners of Europe and much of Asia. In fact, the tech giant only has dedicated online stores for about 17 countries around the world.
Amazon launched its first Scandinavian online store in Sweden last October with the domain name Amazon.se, but there is no equivalent in Norway and Finland. This means that customers there have to make purchases through Amazon stores in other European countries such as the UK (Amazon.co.uk).
But while Wolt tries to tackle Amazon, Amazon is also pushing Wolt’s property: restaurant delivery.
Amazon has invested in London-based Deliveroo and led a $ 575 million round of financing in the company in May 2019 in exchange for a 16% stake. Deliveroo has also begun grocery delivery in recent months as the coronavirus pandemic has made people think twice about leaving their homes.
Amazon also sells groceries on its platform from supermarkets such as Whole Foods, as well as Morrisons and Booths in the UK
Raising capital during coronavirus
Wolt’s Kuusi said it took the company less than three weeks to close the new funding round.
“We went from first phone calls to signing a term sheet in about two and a half weeks,” he said.
Tiger Global, DST, KKR, Prosus, EQT Growth and Coatue joined as new investors. Existing investors 83North, Highland Europe, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, EQT Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners also participated.
Kuusi is also the founder of the European tech events company Slush. Slush went from a gathering of 300 people in Helsinki in 2008 to one of the world’s largest tech events – attended by more than 30,000 people every year before the coronavirus pandemic.