#justsaynotofomo is a hashtag that has yet to take off fully but Michael Jackson’s latest post on European startups raising $20m with no deck shows “Silicon Valley really is a state of mind now.”
He added: “In the latest outbreak of investor FOMO [fear of missing out], Europe’s VCs are falling over each other to invest in this season’s startup craze: speedy grocery delivery startups.”
Even the banks are getting involved. Switzerland-based bank UBS led the $5m series A round for Urb-E, a US-based last-mile urban delivery service based on bike courier.
In its analysis, data provider Pitchbook at the weekend ran through just a handful of others. Instacart hauled in $265m at a $39bn valuation, “a huge uptick from the $17.7bn valuation it landed just five months ago,” it said.
Others included the delivery robot unit of Postmates, which Uber acquired last year and is dubbed Serve Robotics as a spin-off, Brazil-based Loggi $200m at a valuation of about $2bn, Deliverr, which brought in $170m in combined debt and equity funding, Czech Republic’s Rohlik about $226m, Germany-based Flink’s $52m seed round and Dutch competitor Crisp’s grocery delivery service.
Perhaps the biggest player in Europe’s food delivery market remains Deliveroo, a UK-based company that has previously raised well over $1bn,
according to PitchBook data, and is preparing its flotation in London. It, however, now faces competition from Dija, which is now offering 10-minute delivery slots, and a host of others tracked by UKTN.
South Korea-based ecommerce and delivery powerhouse Coupang is also planning its initial public offering to raised $3.4bn —almost the same amount as DoorDash’s IPO proceeds last December, Pitchbook noted.
Earlier in the year, India’s Zomato raised $250m at a $5.4bn valuation; Jüsto raised $65m for grocery deliveries in Mexico and Latin America; Good Eggs, a US-based grocery delivery startup, banked $100m; Wolt pulled in $530m for food delivery for Finland; and Uber agreed to pay $1.1bn for alcohol delivery startup Drizly.
Corporate-backed deals in E-commerce platforms 2011-21
