Miki Kuusi, CEO and co-founder of Wolt.
Wolt
Wolt, a food delivery app that expanded into groceries and retail, raised $ 530 million in trying to beat Amazon.
The financing round at the six-year company was led by ICONIQ Capital and brings the total investment in the company to $ 856 million. Wolt, which did not release its latest assessment, said it would use the money to “continue to expand beyond restaurants”.
Miki Kuusi, who founded Wolt in 2014 in Helsinki, told CNBC: “Our mission is to allow local restaurants and other physical operators to have the tools at their disposal to provide a better e-commerce experience for their local customers than their own. huge foreign competitors are able to do today. “
He added: “We strongly believe that the next wave of e-commerce will go from delivery in the same week and on the same day to delivery in the next 30 minutes or so as the standard. This is what we are focused on building in all of our markets, starting with the restaurant. ”
Rapid growth
When Wolt launched in Helsinki in 2015, it had only 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. She claims to have 27,000 restaurants and retail partners, 50,000 couriers and 2,000 employees.
Although Amazon is huge in the United States and in many other countries, it is not as well established in some corners of Europe and large areas of Asia. In fact, the tech giant only has dedicated online stores for about 17 countries around the world.
Amazon launched its first Nordic 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 must make purchases at Amazon stores in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom (Amazon.co.uk).
But as Wolt tries to conquer Amazon, Amazon is also encroaching on Wolt’s land: restaurant deliveries.
Amazon invested in London’s Deliveroo, leading a $ 575 million financing round in May 2019 in exchange for a 16% stake.
Deliveroo has also started delivering groceries in recent months, as the coronavirus pandemic makes people think twice about leaving home.
Raising capital during coronavirus
Kuolt, from Wolt, said the company took less than three weeks to close the new round of financing.
“We went from the first calls to signing a commitment in about two and a half weeks,” he said.
Tiger Global, DST, KKR, Prosus, EQT Growth and Coatue have joined as new investors. Existing investors 83 North, Highland Europe, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, EQT Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners also participated.
Kuusi is also the founder of the European technology event company Slush. Slush went from meeting 300 people in Helsinki in 2008 to one of the biggest technology events in the world – with more than 30,000 people attending each year before the coronavirus pandemic.