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 has now apparently joined Flink. With this, Flink is currently outstripping its arch-rival Gorillas in the assessment. Rewe only acquired a stake in Flink in June.
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. However, Swift will not be absorbed in Doordash. 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 get into Gorillas for the same rating as Flink is now. This deal has now apparently been finally canceled.
Instead, the “Manager Magazin” recently speculated that the German Dax company Delivery Hero would invest in gorillas. In the scene there is also speculation about a current smaller interim financing round for gorillas to secure the capital requirements of the lossy business model – especially since the deal with Delivery Hero could still burst.
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High capital requirements
Flink started in Hamburg and Berlin at the turn of the year to compete with gorillas. Behind it are industry experts: the former Home24 boss Christoph Cordes and ex-consultant Oliver Merkel, as well as the founders of the Hamburg start-up Pickery, which served as the starting base for Flink. The agency “Bloomberg” 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.
In the meantime, Doordash is preparing the start and is looking for a massive 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 wanted. 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.
Other delivery services are also expanding. The Northern European supplier Wolt is about to start in Hamburg – as is Delivery Hero with its delivery brand Foodpanda, which has just started its return to the German market in Berlin.
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.
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. With Rewe and Doordash at his side, Flink now seems comparatively well positioned.
More: Delivery supermarket Flink teams up with Rewe