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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Instacart, Crisp, Rohlik, Flink. Online Grocery Gets Funding in the U.S. and Europe

Apparently investors have been shopping for online grocery startups, as there was a spate of funding news in the sector across North America and Europe over the last 12 hours.

Grocery delivery service Instacart raised another $265 million from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, and T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. This brings the total amount raised by Instacart to roughly $2.6 billion and values the company at $39 billion.

Over in the Czech Republic, online grocer Rohlik raised €190 million (~$230 million USD) in a round led by Partech with participation from Index Ventures, the EBRD, Quadrille Capital, J&T Bank, R2G, and Enern. According to TechCrunch, Rohlik offers items that it buys itself wholesale, as well as offering goods in concert with existing retailers. The company will use the funds to expand across its existing service areas (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Austria) and into new markets (Germany, Poland, Romania).

In the Netherlands, Dutch grocer Crisp announced that it has raised a €30 million (~$36 million USD) Series B round of funding led by Target Global with participation from Keen Venture Partners and others. EU-Startups reports that Crisp offers fresh seasonal ingredients sourced locally and delivered in one hour across the Netherlands. This brings the total amount raised by Crisp to €46 million (~$55 million USD) since 2018.

And finally, German delivery-only grocer Flink announced that it has raised $52 million in seed funding. TechCrunch writes that Target Global led this funding as well, along with participation from Northzone Cherry Ventures and TriplePoint Capital. This brings the total amount raised by Flink to $64 million, as the company is expanding beyond Germany and into France and the Netherlands.

Investment in the online grocery space has been frothy since the start of the year. In the U.K., Weezy raised $20 million. Here in the U.S., Good Eggs raised $100 million and Imperfect Foods raised $110 million. But all these deals pale next to Chinese grocery app Xingsheng Youxuan, which raised $2 billion.

Why so much money? Partly it’s because the pandemic and limited trips outside our homes pushed people into record amounts of online grocery shopping last year. But as we’re a year into this pandemic, new habits around online grocery have formed. In the month of January, U.S. consumers spent $9.3 billion on grocery e-commerce, and online sales of food and beverages is projected to hit $143 billion by 2025. In other words, the market for online grocery markets is looking pretty super right now.

Crisp Launches with $14.5 Million to Curb Food Waste with AI and Big Data

Crisp, a startup which leverages AI and big data to cut down on food waste, launched today from stealth mode with $14.5 million dollars in funding (h/t VentureBeat). The funding was led by FirstMark Capital with $10 million from the cofounders themselves.

Crisp was cofounded in 2016 by Arie Traasdahl, who previously cofounded digital entertainment service Thumbplay (now iHeartMedia) and marketing tech company Tapad. The New York City-based startup gathers data from past consumer purchases, promotions, POS systems and even weather to help suppliers, distributors, and retailers forecast demand for their fresh food inventory, so they can more accurately decide how much of each item to buy. Crisp’s SaaS platform integrates directly into existing retail inventory and PoS systems such as Salesforce and Quickbooks. So far, the company has done one alpha test phase of their technology with 25 retailers and wholesalers, including Scandinavian food supplier/retailer Rema Foods.

Photo: Crisp dashboard

Crisp isn’t totally alone in trying to optimize fresh food ordering in the retail sector. Zest Fresh and Walmart both have monitoring systems that help suppliers figure out where to send produce so it can be consumed as quickly as possible. Most similar to Crisp is Afresh, a company which uses machine learning to analyze consumer data and project demand of fresh foods (produce, fish, etc.) for grocery stores. Crisp is trying to differentiate itself from its competitors with its user-friendliness; its website states that it can be up and running in only 15 minutes.

I’m always a bit skeptical when we hear companies throwing around tech buzzwords like “AI” and “big data” as catchall solutions to entrenched system-wide issues, such as food waste. But it’s still encouraging to see companies tackling food waste in a preventative way. If Crisp can find a way to optimize food ordering and cut down on retail surplus (which, admittedly, is a major task), it would sync up well with services like Karma and Wasteless, which sell soon-to-expire food for discounted prices in grocery stores. Together, these companies could help reduce the roughly 1.3 billion tons of food we waste each year — roughly one-third of all the food produced globally.

Crisp’s platform will launch in beta on October 1.