- A fast-delivery startup focused on luxury goods has just raised $20 million.
- Munich-based Arive landed the fresh funds in a Series A round led by Revolut-backer Balderton.
- We got an exclusive look at the 10-slide pitch deck it used to raise the cash.
Arive, a fast-delivery startup focused on high-end consumer products, has raised $20 million in fresh funds from Balderton Capital.
The German company, founded in 2021, delivers everything from Aesop handwash to iPhones in up to an hour, via an electric vehicle. Arive’s riders are direct employees, rather than gig economy workers, and the app has set open hours.
School friends and now cofounders Linus Fries and Max Reeker have long talked about solving last-mile logistics.
“You have a lot of these trucks clogging the streets increasing a lot of traffic and increasing the carbon emissions within the city center,” Fries told Insider. The cofounders wanted to bridge the gap between online purchases and offline delivery and make it greener.
When e-commerce and the super-fast grocery delivery market boomed during the pandemic, everything fell into place. Mobile-first habits and a growing impatience amongst consumers also played a role, Fries said.
“No one’s really thinking about brands and the bigger market, instead of groceries, which is e-commerce. No one’s really tapping into that, and we felt like, okay, there’s a massive opportunity,” he added.
During a pilot in June 2021, the pair cycled around Munich, where the startup is headquartered, delivering items themselves.
The company vets all brands that are listed on the app to ensure they have sustainable and ethical practices. The platform also curates content for users and Fries hopes it will one day be the “Instagram for shopping,” rather than being just transactional.
Arive’s business model resembles that of dark kitchens, with last-mile warehouses in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt that are full of stock, but the founders plan to eventually open the sites as stores and provide somewhere for locals to grab a coffee.
The startup claims it feeds into a wider ethos of being a “transparent and sympathetic company” and that it adds to the high street rather than challenging it.
The Series A was led by Balderton Capital, which has previously backed the likes of challenger bank Revolut and navigation app Citymapper. The fresh funds will be used to launch a retail vertical, where local stores can list their products and use Arive’s riders to deliver orders to customers.
Fries and Reeker are also eyeing new European markets, but could not reveal where. There are also plans to grow the team, which is currently over 80.
The latest cash injection brings Arive’s total raised to $27 million, building on a seed round with 468 Capital and La Famiglia in August 2021 before the product launched the following month.
Check out the redacted pitch deck below.
Credit: Source link
