Number26 Grabs $10.6 Million To Bring Its Bank Of The Future To EveryoneWell, what do we have here. Just a couple of days after participating in European restaurant delivery service Take Eat Easy’s €6 million Series A funding round, ‘startup factory’ and e-commerce behemoth Rocket Internet has acquired Germany’s Volo, a startup playing in exactly the same space. If I was Take Eat Easy’s CEO I might be slightly puzzled to say the least.
Similar to Take Eat Easy, and a number of other direct competitors, such as Deliveroo in the U.K., and DoorDash in the U.S., Volo lets you order food online from restaurants that don’t traditionally offer a take-out and delivery service.
This differentiates it from Rocket Internet’s own Foodpanda, Delivery Hero, and Just-Eat, which operate a pure marketplace model that relies on the restaurants themselves to handle delivery.
A graduate of Telefónica’s startup accelerator Wayra (and first exit for the telco’s Munich-based academy), Volo originally launched in October 2014 in Munich, but has recently expanded to Berlin, and Frankfurt, with the German cities of Hamburg, Cologne, and Duesseldorf up next. It’s also talking up aggressive international plans — 9 counties, apparently — including Italy, Spain and Sweden.
The fact that Volo operates in Germany, with Spain seemingly imminent, appears to put it on a path to directly compete with Rocket Internet investment Take Eat Easy, which says its immediate expansion plans include the two countries. Plans can change of course, so we will have to wait and see. Rocket Internet declined to comment.
Terms of Rocket Internet’s acquisition of Volo also remain undisclosed, so it’s hard to tell if this is a home run for the young startup, or its backers, including Telefónica.
“Together with the founders of Volo, we have devised an exit strategy and are very proud to have implemented this so successfully,” says Garan Goodman, Managing Director of Wayra Deutschland, in a statement. “The team at Volo have made some fantastic achievements. We are more than impressed by the potential for success presented by the teams currently at the Academy”.
Meanwhile, whatever the subtleties (or not) of Rocket Internet’s strategy, it’s clear that it continues to see food delivery, or moving convenience food online in all its various guises, as a massive growth opportunity. The e-commerce giant has been aggressively building out its Global Online Takeaway Group, a roll up of all its food delivery companies, which include online take-out ordering service Foodpanda, and a significant stake in rival Delivery Hero.
Similar to Take Eat Easy, and a number of other direct competitors, such as Deliveroo in the U.K., and DoorDash in the U.S., Volo lets you order food online from restaurants that don’t traditionally offer a take-out and delivery service.
This differentiates it from Rocket Internet’s own Foodpanda, Delivery Hero, and Just-Eat, which operate a pure marketplace model that relies on the restaurants themselves to handle delivery.
A graduate of Telefónica’s startup accelerator Wayra (and first exit for the telco’s Munich-based academy), Volo originally launched in October 2014 in Munich, but has recently expanded to Berlin, and Frankfurt, with the German cities of Hamburg, Cologne, and Duesseldorf up next. It’s also talking up aggressive international plans — 9 counties, apparently — including Italy, Spain and Sweden.
The fact that Volo operates in Germany, with Spain seemingly imminent, appears to put it on a path to directly compete with Rocket Internet investment Take Eat Easy, which says its immediate expansion plans include the two countries. Plans can change of course, so we will have to wait and see. Rocket Internet declined to comment.
Terms of Rocket Internet’s acquisition of Volo also remain undisclosed, so it’s hard to tell if this is a home run for the young startup, or its backers, including Telefónica.
“Together with the founders of Volo, we have devised an exit strategy and are very proud to have implemented this so successfully,” says Garan Goodman, Managing Director of Wayra Deutschland, in a statement. “The team at Volo have made some fantastic achievements. We are more than impressed by the potential for success presented by the teams currently at the Academy”.
Meanwhile, whatever the subtleties (or not) of Rocket Internet’s strategy, it’s clear that it continues to see food delivery, or moving convenience food online in all its various guises, as a massive growth opportunity. The e-commerce giant has been aggressively building out its Global Online Takeaway Group, a roll up of all its food delivery companies, which include online take-out ordering service Foodpanda, and a significant stake in rival Delivery Hero.
India’s Snapdeal has been on an acquisition spree in the last several months, tapping into the $1.1 billion it has raised from the likes of Softbank to expand from being a marketplace for goods into a platform for all kinds of online transactions. The latest chapter in this story is today’s news that it has acquired a majority stake in RupeePower, a provider of loans and credit cards.The terms of the deal have not been disclosed — we are asking — but it is a controlling stake. Snapdeal says that it will launch a financial services marketplace on the back of the acquisition, and projects that it will provide $1 billion of loans over the next two years through the platform. It is not completely clear how Snapdeal plans to finance these loans — we are asking — but it sounds like it will work with financial institutions to both help finance these loans and as a way of helping those banks sell more effectively into smaller markets.“Financial Services companies will now be able to leverage Snapdeal’s nationwide reach across 5000+ towns and cities,” Snapdeal noted. “Often resolving to following up on cold leads, these companies will be able to market and target their products and services to a captive audience on Snapdeal implying higher conversion vis-à-vis the traditional offline channels…The benefits thus realised by the financial services companies will be re-funneled and offered to customers as exclusive financial products/services offers on Snapdeal.”You can think of RupeePower as something equivalent to the Kabbage of India: using an online tool and algorithms that work in the background, RupeePower gives users the ability to apply for loans that will take many no more than 5 minutes to get approved. Unlike Kabbage, the loans are focused mainly on consumers rather than businesses and cover personal loans but also larger amounts for cars and homes.This will play specifically into the fact that autos and real estate are two of the new categories that Snapdeal is now selling online: now you can buy the vehicle and finance it in one place. Snapdeal also says it will use the current product — which also includes credit card services it runs in tandem with banks — to expand into other areas of financial services, which are fragmented and antiquated in India. These will include things like extended warranties — which, again, Snapdeal can offer alongside the products it sells on its main platform.“Realizing the various difficulties that consumers face while deciding and purchasing financial products/services and the challenges that companies face whilst reaching out to the ‘right’ audience, we have brought RupeePower into our family, to help solve the distribution challenges of the financial services ecosystem and make it more inclusive,” said Kunal Bahl, cofounder and CEO of Snapdeal, in a statement. “The same way Snapdeal has democratised retail in India, now we aspire to democratise access to credit.”RupeePower was founded in 2011 and says it has financed INR 1,500 crores ($24 million) in the current financial year. It’s tapping into the bigger trend in India (and the rest of the world) of services like this moving online, plus the growing middle class in the country that wants to borrow more money, and in this way specifically.Tejasvi Mohanram, founder and CEO of RupeePower, projects that digitally originated loans account for only 7.5% of all loans today, but that will rise to 40% in the next four years to reach $67 billion of loans. “Our emphasis will be on scaling RupeePower into the top match-making platform between lenders and borrowers, providing consumers with the best targeted offers and a super-simplified loan process, while ensuring lower opex & smarter credit match for lenders,” he said in a statement.The acquisition comes on the heels of Snapdeal making other investments, including acquisitions to build out its logistics services.