Even with huge billion dollar players already in the food delivery industry, the food delivery app Wolt based in Helsinki has be able to raise over $11 million fresh funding from wealthy Nordic investors that include the Skype founder and the Nokia chairman as the business announced its launch in Stockholm on Friday.
We now are expanding in the Baltic and Nordics region. The funds are for the expansion through hiring and launching new teams for new cities and expanding within their existing countries, said Wolt’s COO and its co-founder Juhani Mykkanen.
EQT Ventures was the leader amongst the new round of backers including high profile backsters Ilkka Paanahen the Supercell CEO and Niklas Zennstrom the Skype founder.
Because of the new investors, Kees Koolen the former Booking.com CEO said he would join the business board in a few months. Wolt in all has raised over $14 million.
Wolt’s fund raising before, included Lifeline Ventures, Inventure, Pii Ketvel, co-founder of Supercell, Visa Forsten and real estate mogul Polu Zabludeowicz.
Wolt has an office in a crowded space with other companies such as Just Eat, Take Eat Easy, Grubhub, Deliveroo, Grubhub, Foodora and Seamless.
More established players exist worldwide, said Miki Kuusi the co-founder and CEO.
The food industry is only 0.5% digital in any form and quite unexplored.
The food delivery space has been able to attract large investment of late with Alibaba investing more than $900 million in Ele.me a food delivery app in China. In early April on demand delivery Jinn, based in London, received $7.5 million.
During late March, Frichti the delivery service based in France raised over $13.4 billion to invest in infrastructure to serve additional clients.
Although some tough competition stands in Wolt’s way, the company achieved a substantial market share for Finland, a country of just 5.4 million nationwide.
