The last few weeks have been tricky for German online food service Delivery Hero — its biggest competitor getting serious funding, accusations of Leaving aside a recent bit of intrigue that industrial sabotage — but it seems that the company is doing rather well.
The company, which trades under the name Lieferheld at home and Delivery Hero across the rest of Europe, said on Tuesday that it grew 84 percent in the first quarter of this year and is now the market-leading online service for take-out in Germany, Poland, Austria, Switzerland and Finland.
We like to hear real numbers, and Delivery Hero’s happy to, er, deliver. Customers? More than four million. Affiliate restaurants and delivery services? 19,000. Global revenues? On target for a cool €250 million-plus this year — that’s $ 320 million — around two-thirds of which is coming from outside Germany.
Here’s a graph showing that growth:
“We are currently one of the fastest-growing companies in the world,” co-CEO Fabian Siegel boasted in a statement. And the company’s not done yet.
Lukas Jaworski of investors Team Europe told me Delivery Hero’s HungryHouse.co.uk was now a “strong number two” in the UK, aiming to overtake the well-funded market leader Just-Eat within the next 12 months. “We had enormous growth in the [UK] in the last weeks,” he added.
Other markets the company is targeting include Sweden, Russia, Australia and Mexico.
Of course, all this expansion takes cash, and the company says it’s taken in €40 million ($ 51 million) in funding since it started in October 2010, from runet, e-Tengelmann, Kite Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, Point Nine Capital and Team Europe.
So what’s next? Jaworski gnomically hints at a launch in a new country during the third quarter of this year, but there’s little more to go on.
Wherever that launch will be, it seems that Delivery Hero is approaching a key threshold. After all, it’s not really a new idea to act as a hub for food delivery services, but once you’ve got enough brand recognition and scale, you become a natural choice of partner for the vendors.
Particularly with the advent of smartphone apps (Delivery Hero offers them for Android and iPhone, naturally), now’s as good a time as ever to become the big beast. Delivery Hero just needs to hit those targets and maintain its pace to be in with a chance.
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