The Next Wave of Tech: Groceries Galore, Wooden Debit Cards and Social Banking
Some really large rounds taking place across the continent at the start of March.
It feels as though the recent reorganisation of society over the last year has sped up a lot of change within the startup ecosystem. This weeks roundup of deals really does exemplify this with many of these recently funded businesses focusing on Gen-Z consumers, decentralised finance, sustainable banking and the reinventiuon of supermarkets.
And yes that’s right, another grocery delivery platform launches across Europe. There will soon be more of these companies than people wanting to use them.
Last week a $52 million Seed round was announced for German online grocery store, Flink Food. This was reported to be 50-50 equity/debt, but nonetheless an extremely large first round of capital to take on.
Quick thoughts: This has clearly been a model that numerous startups across the continent have tried to emulate in the last year or so, with Dija and Weezy in London being other examples (Both announced ~$25m rounds in Feb 2021). Clearly, traditional supermarket’s online delivery flows were not optimised for recent levels of demand (producer -> warehouse -> store/distribution hub -> customer), and the opportunity for ‘dark stores’ (hyper-local, delivery-only fulfilment centres) seems to have emerged. I think there are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding these businesses, mainly relating to their unit economics and the consumer demand for their services in a less digital-first world.
All that being said, these companies are building strong, capital-intensive and operationally robust moats that will most likely lead to later-stage consolidation once incumbent retailers or Amazon decide to go shopping themselves.
On with the funding rounds! The last few weeks were interesting…
🇩🇪 Germany
Raised: $52m (Seed)
Description: Flink Food GmbH is building an online grocery and food e-commerce operation.
Investors: Northzone, Target Global, Cherry Ventures and TriplePoint Capital.
Raised: $6m (Seed)
Description: Quality Match is a business looking to improve machine learning models through optimized datasets with controlled annotation quality.
Investors: LEA Partners.
Raised: $1.3m (Pre-Seed)
Description: Monite is a finance management platform that automates the admin and accounting processes for SMEs.
Investors: Runa Capital, Signals Venture Capital, Tomahawk and others.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Raised: $15.5m (Seed)
Description: Bottlepay lets users buy, store, send and withdraw Bitcoin with a single click, also enabling seamless social payments with a single tweet, message, or social media post on platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Discord.
Investors: The round was led by a range of investors including British fund manager and billionaire Alan Howard, present and former Goldman Sachs partners, FinTech Collective, NYDIG, and tech entrepreneur Phil Doye.
Raised: $5.1m (Seed)
Description: TreeCard is a Fintech offering a spending card made out of wood and the promise to fund reforesting via the interchange fees generated.
Investors: EQT Ventures, Seedcamp, Episode1 and others.
Raised: $5m (Seed)
Description: Humaans is a London-based HR startup developing an employee on-boarding and management platform. TechCrunch has more here.
Investors: Y-Combinator, Moonfire Ventures, Frontline Ventures, Lachy Groom and others.
Raised: $3m (Seed)
Description: Cogita is a wholesale B2B platform aiming to drastically increase market efficiency and supply chain margins.
Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners and LocalGlobe.
Raised: $3m (Seed)
Description: Better Origin offers an AI-powered insect mini-farms which converts excess nutrients into essential nutrients, which are fed to poultry livestock.
Investors: Fly Ventures and Metavallon VC.
Raised: $2.2m (Seed)
Description: Ember is a software platform to automate the accounting process for SMEs.
Investors: Anthemix, Innovation Nest and Spring Ventures.
Raised: $275k (Seed)
Description: Alloxentric is a communications platform that integrates voice and text to design the best contact strategies in an automated, multi-channel and low-cost way.
Investors: RLC Ventures.
🇱🇻 Latvia
Raised: $2m (Pre-Seed)
Description: Zelf is a neobank targeting a Gen-Z userbase. It aims to bring money to their messengers with AI-powered voice control over financial operations.
Investors: Chris Adelsbach, Hard Yaka, 3vc and others.
🇫🇷 France
Raised: $2m (Pre-Seed)
Description: Open-source architecture for efficiently designing, testing and deploying embedded applications.
Investors: Bpifrance, Aquiti Gestion and others.