We do this by handling the complexity of the delivery on the restaurant's behalf”. “We quickly learnt that the magical product market fit for bringing the restaurant online was to offer a quick and predictable delivery experience from restaurants that didn't use to be available for delivery. “We started with an exclusive focus on the restaurant, as it's the biggest local service with an underlying high-frequency use case,” he says. I know I’m not going to be able to stay as CEO unless I’m able to learn a lot all the time.Kuusi says that the latest funding round is based on the belief that local services in the offline world will gradually be brought online by players “that can execute and maintain a great customer experience”. “For me, the excitement is always taking the next leap. It’s a very different type of CEO role than when he first started Wolt in 2014, he says - but that’s what he likes. “It’s an interesting thing - how you build the governance, practices, and processes to be publicly listed.” “We started the readiness process after the last round,” says Kuusi, who’s currently hiring for a chief financial officer to bolster those efforts. Existing investors 83North, Highland Europe, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, EQT Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners also participated in the round.Īside from building a retail delivery empire, they will also be advising Wolt on its path to IPO. “As a result, we haven’t used a single euro of the financing raised in the spring,” says Kuusi.Īlong with ICONIQ Growth, which led the round, Wolt’s new investors include Tiger Global, DST, KKR, Prosus, EQT Growth and Coatue. We haven’t used a single euro of the financing raised in the spring. “It was insurance we took for the uncertainty in the world,” says Kuusi - at that point, many restaurants were still closed and it was unclear whether the pandemic would slow the company’s growth. In May 2020, it raised €100m in a round led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. Last time Wolt raised capital, the team’s motivations were very different. “It was more us thinking, how can we optimise the next three to five years ahead?” “When we started raising this round, we had no view into what the competition was doing,” says Kuusi, who went out to raise late in October. And Turkish speedy delivery startup Getir is reported to also be raising capital, and expanding into new markets, including London. Along with Glovo’s $100m deal with real estate platform Stoneweg to open 100 dark stores (with Glovo managing delivery operations, and Stoneweg building and refurbishing the stores), Deliveroo also raised $180m and hit a $7bn valuation. Wolt’s latest fundraising comes amid a flurry of activity in the delivery sector. “The reason we’re also working on dark stores ourselves is to develop the tech - and because it’s sometimes not the quickest thing to work with partners.” Why raise now? Wolt is still opening some of its own dark stores, however - if only to figure out how to make them work best. There’s more flexibility on timings and the average order value tends to be far higher. That means that, although Wolt takes less commission on these ‘big basket’ orders than it does on restaurant food delivery (which is north of 20%), it’s a good line of business.
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