Berlin-headquartered online food ordering empire Delivery Hero is delivering a new $5m investment to its partner in India, TastyKhana.
The news – with the size of the deal confirmed by TastyKhana founder and CEO Shachin Bharadwaj in a tweet today – follows an earlier seed investment in 2012. Since the seed deal, TastyKhana, founded in 2007 in Pune in western India, has expanded from two cities to seven and over 3000 restaurant partners. The company said in a blog post today it would aim to continue its “exponential growth”.
Delivery Hero, founded about two years ago, operates food ordering services in 14 countries, mostly in Europe but also in Australia, South Korea, China and Mexico – it claims to now be leading in six of those markets. A good part of that expansion has taken place through strategic investments in local partners – it recently completed a full takeover of former rival HungryHouse in the UK.
The company is talking up the mobile strengths of TastyKhana as the clincher to today’s deal:
The focus of TastyKhana lies especially in the mobile sector. Mobile has shown an increase in sales by 40 per cent within the last months. TastyKhana is also the only Indian online food delivery company which offers apps for Android, iPhone and Blackberry.
Delivery Hero – plans to break even in 2013
In exchange for facilitating online orders and bringing in new customers, Delivery Hero (and presumably its partners) take a cut of purchases made through its web and mobile apps. The company made about €25m in revenue on about €250m worth of orders in 2011, according to the Financial Times – those figures are likely to have increased significantly last year. The group aims to break even in 2013.
Delivery Hero itself has raised over $100m in investment from backers including Team Europe (also an investor in VentureVillage’s parent company) and Kite Ventures. Its rivals include JustEat – already well established in India – and Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda, which raised an additional $20m to support its global expansion in May.
Image credit: Flickr user mastermaq
