Miki Kuusi, CEO and co-founder of Wolt.
Wolt
Wolt, a food delivery app that has expanded to supermarkets and retail, has raised $ 530 million while trying to deal with Amazon.
ICONIQ Capital led the six-year financing round of the company and brings the total investment in the firm to $ 856 million. Wolt, who did not disclose his latest valuation, said he will 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 brick and mortar operators to have the tools at their disposal to provide a better e-commerce experience for its local customers than the one that have big competitors abroad are able to do today ”.
He added: “We strongly believe that the next wave of e-commerce will happen from the same week and same day delivery to delivery over the next 30 minutes or so as standard. 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 around 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.
Although Amazon is huge in the US and 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 online stores dedicated to about 17 countries around the world.
Amazon launched its first Nordic online store in Sweden last October under the domain name Amazon.se, but there is no equivalent in Norway and Finland. This means that customers there have to shop through Amazon stores in other European countries, such as the UK (Amazon.co.uk).
But while Wolt seems to be facing Amazon, Amazon is also invading Wolt’s turf: restaurant deliveries.
Amazon has invested in Deliveroo in London, leading a $ 575 million round of financing for the company 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 their homes.
Capital increase during coronavirus
Kuolt de 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 deadline sheet 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 83North, 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 a meeting of 300 people in Helsinki in 2008 to one of the largest technology events in the world, which was attended by more than 30,000 people each year before the coronavirus pandemic.