High marketing and delivery costs require a lot of risk capital.
(Photo: Reuters)
Hamburg The super-fast grocery delivery services continue to attract investors. The US delivery service Doordash apparently joined Flink on Wednesday. According to a report, the rival Gorillas is getting even more money from investors – the round is led by the Dax group Delivery Hero.
From the Flink environment it was said that the current round valued the Berlin delivery service at around 2.1 billion dollars. Accordingly, around 600 million dollars of fresh money will flow. According to “The Information”, gorillas will even receive 900 million dollars and thus be worth three billion dollars to investors.
Both providers should remain independent despite the entry of strategic investors. Flink will not be absorbed in Doordash, it is said in the Flink environment. Rather, the Americans wanted to start their own business in Berlin. However, the future German version of the Doordash app could integrate several delivery options – including not only pizza services but also the fast delivery service from Flink. Flink apparently wants to leave this announcement to Doordash. The financing round may not be officially announced for a few weeks, it said.
With the deal, which is said to have been signed on Wednesday, Flink has become a so-called unicorn even faster than gorillas, i.e. a start-up with a valuation of over a billion dollars. In addition, Flink has also disputed the investor Doordash with the competitor Gorillas. A month ago there were several press reports that Doordash wanted to join Gorillas for the same rating as Flink is now. This deal has now apparently been finally canceled.
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Instead, the delivery company Delivery Hero comes into play, which is currently setting up its own express delivery service in Germany under the Foodpanda brand. Its boss Niklas Östberg indirectly confirmed the deal on Thursday night on Twitter: Delivery Hero will not stop supporting winners, he wrote in a message that was deleted shortly afterwards.
High capital requirements
Flink started in Hamburg and Berlin at the turn of the year to compete with the gorillas, which had been founded in the federal capital a few months earlier. Industry experts are behind Flink: the former Home24 boss Christoph Cordes and ex-advisor Oliver Merkel, as well as the founders of the Hamburg start-up Pickery, which served as the starting point for Flink. The Bloomberg agency was the first to report on the current financing round. The last time the supermarket operator Rewe joined Flink was in June. Rewe supplies the start-up with goods.
The business model causes high start-up losses for all providers for daily business and the advertising battle in the cities. Therefore, the race should also be decided by the risk capital collected – and by the strongest partners.
Flink’s new investor, Doordash, was founded in the US in 2013 and has been on the stock exchange since late 2020 and is worth almost $ 74 billion. The delivery service competes in its home market with Uber Eats, among others, and offers delivery from restaurants by freelance drivers. Flink, on the other hand, delivers supermarket items from its own small warehouses with employed bicycle couriers.
In the meantime, Doordash is preparing its own start in Germany and is looking for a large number of employees. In addition to operational positions in Cologne, Stuttgart and Frankfurt, a noticeable number of office jobs are advertised in Berlin. Apparently, more than a small American branch is to be built in Germany. A number of software developers, analysts and strategists are also being sought. When asked, a Doordash spokeswoman pointed out that the company was already active in 4,000 cities in the USA, Canada, Japan and Australia. The international markets are growing “solidly”. “We are constantly evaluating opportunities for expansion and want to expand our international presence,” she said. Doordash has established a fixed process for this in order to be able to use size effects.
Gorillas, who apparently got offended at Doordash at the last minute, had been looking for a partner for several months. Driver protests made the process more difficult. Again and again, details penetrated: In early summer, founder Kagan Sümer is said to have hoped for a significantly higher valuation than the three billion dollars that have now been achieved. Nevertheless, he now has the money to continue expanding in Europe. Existing investors such as Tencent from China and Coatue from the USA are also said to have participated in the round, according to “The Information”.
Other delivery services are also expanding. The Northern European provider Wolt is about to start in Hamburg.
More: Delivery supermarket Flink teams up with Rewe