THE 5 DEALS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THIS WEEK
🤖 🚚 🇪🇪 Starship Technologies (founded in Estonia) raised $42M for its small sidewalk delivery robots. It has now raised more than $100M in funding. It currently operates 1,700 robots which make 10,000 deliveries per day.
We recently covered the boom in food automation from cooking robots to delivery robots. Starship seems to be well-positioned in this race.
🍽️ 🇺🇸 DoorDash (restaurant delivery leader in the US) acquired Bbot, a digital ordering platform for restaurants.
This acquisition is a sign of both the vitality of the digital ordering ecosystem (from digital menus to pay-at-table to ordering centralization services) and the growing appetite of restaurant delivery giants to diversify into services. By adding services on top of their current delivery and marketing platform, they will differentiate and leverage their relationship with restaurants even more.
🥚 🇳🇱 Ovo, a Dutch startup raised €34M to prevent the killing of male chicks. Its technology can identify the gender of eggs before they hatch.
🍱 🇺🇸 Weee! (mentioned in our report on unicorns) a multicultural grocery delivery platform focused on Asian & Hispanic consumers, raised $425M.
More than one giant deal, Weee! is “only” the leader of a growing ecosystem of startups that are working on multicultural grocery delivery services. We have recently observed many such ventures in Europe, notably in the UK and in Germany. We expect many more to emerge, as each tends to target a specific group with its “hard-to-get” products.
🧫 🇺🇸 Stämm Biotech raised $17M for its next-generation bioreactor. Bioreactors are at the core of the alternative protein revolution. These devices are the place “where the magic happens” and where cells multiply (in cellular agriculture) or where fermentation happens in other technologies. Stämm’s bioreactors hope to solve many of the current hurdles facing startups in the space with a new design.
BEYOND FUNDING, WHAT ELSE HAPPENED?
🏪 🌑 Cities on both sides of the Atlantic are pushing back against dark stores (mini-warehouses used to deliver groceries in less than 10 to 30 minutes):
- in New York, companies would not be able to advertise the 15 minutes anymore while a “crackdown” is being prepared.
- Paris wants quick-commerce companies to respect the zoning. Many of the 80 warehouses in the city have been set up in commercial buildings. They would have to move out quickly to avoid a fine
🔪 🌑 An interesting tool to calculate the viability of a virtual restaurant. You can modify many parameters from the 3rd party delivery platform commission to the number of daily orders.
Toying five minutes with this tool shows how hard creating a profitable virtual restaurant can be without a strong brand behind it to generate a lot of orders.
🛩️ 🧀 Wing (an Alphabet division) announced that it had hit 200,000 drone deliveries and now operates 1,000 deliveries per day. Active in multiple countries, Wing seems to be making the bulk of its deliveries in Australia.
