Belgian foodtech startup Deliverect, which provides software to restaurants to organise online orders, has raised a $65m Series C round.
The funding round was led by DST and Redpoint Ventures, and included additional funding OMERS, Newion, Smartfin and Founders. It brings the total raised by the company to $90m.
The investment comes as Deliverect, founded in 2018, has reported a 750% increase in the number of orders processed each week across the last year.
It’s part of the wider trend of explosive growth that the online food delivery industry has enjoyed since the Covid-19 pandemic began, forcing many restaurants to move to online delivery.
Across the course of last year, for example, Deliveroo — one of the platforms that Deliverect helps restaurants to integrate — saw 20k new restaurants sign up.
“The restaurant industry is in a historical moment of change and digitalisation, and delivery has become crucial for the survival of this industry,” says Zhong Xu, the company’s founder.
“Our mission is simple: to be the backbone of on-demand food helping to support restaurants around the world to thrive in the online space.”
Deliverect’s software allows restaurants to integrate incoming orders from different delivery companies into a single system.
A lot of restaurants work with several delivery partners each of which provides its own tablet and ordering system. Although it’s often financially beneficial for restaurants to be on multiple platforms, it can cause chaos in the kitchen.
The platform works with most of the major delivery players in Europe, including Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Glovo, Takeaway.com, Delivery Hero and Just Eat.
The company’s currently active in 30 countries around the world. It’s currently used by 10k restaurants and dark kitchens around the world, including big brands like Pret a Manger, Dishoom and KFC.
Although the pandemic has spurred on adoption of online delivery from restaurants, Xu says that it’s an acceleration of a longer term trend that was present before Covid-19 came along, and one they expect to see continue.
“We started Deliverect because we saw that restaurants were asking for help transitioning from offline to online, a trend that started well before the Covid-19 pandemic,” he says.
“Ultimately the end user has changed — over the last 10 years people have been gravitating towards online deliveries: the pandemic has only accelerated the rate of adoption.”
Xu also says that, when restaurants start to open up to diners, the system will become more critical, as kitchens try to juggle in-person and online orders.
João Almeida, CFO of KFC Iberia, explains that the model saves restaurants time, as well as ensuring mistakes aren’t made.
“The time that each rider waits for their order at the restaurant has decreased,” he says. “We've also seen a substantial decrease in the number of incidents, reducing both missing and incorrect orders.”
Since raising its Series B round last April, Deliverect has quadrupled its team from 50 to 200 people.
The company says the new funding will be used for commercial expansion in core countries, such as the UK, as well as to expand its presence in the US.
