Finnish food app gets massive funding from Nokia and Skype

The founder of Skype and the chairman of Nokia have both heavily invested in an Helsinki-based food delivery app Wolt by investing $11 million in the business even with billion dollar behemoths already in the food delivery market.

“We are now expanding in the Nordics and in the Baltic region. The funds go to the expansion – hiring the launching teams for the new cities and expanding within new countries – and product development at the HQ,” said Juhani Mykkänen, Wolt’s COO and co-founder.

EQT Ventures led the new round with new high profile backers Niklas Zennström, the founder of Skype and Ilkka Paananen, the CEO of Supercell. Nokia’s chairman Risto Siilasmaa who participated in the company’s previous round, was part of the illustrious investor lineup.

As a result of the new investment, Kees Koolen, the former CEO of Booking.com will join the company’s board of directors.

Wolt’s previous rounds included Inventure, Lifeline Ventures, Pii Ketvel, Supercell co-founder Visa Forsten and Poju Zabludowicz, a real-estate tycoon and one of the wealthiest people in Finland.

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Wolt operates in a crowded space with companies such as Delivery Hero – valued at $3 billion, – Just Eat, Take Eat Easy, Deliveroo, Grubhub, Seamless and Foodora all competing for the market share.

“There are a number of more established players globally. I’d say our biggest competitor is really the corner grocery store where people go every week without really thinking about it. The food industry is around 0.5% digital in any form (US data). I’d say it’s a pretty unexplored market still outside delivery of pizza,” said Miki Kuusi, the CEO and co-founder of Wolt.

The delivery space has attracted big investments recently with Alibaba investing $900 million on Chinese food-delivery app Ele.me and earlier in April, London-based on-demand delivery service Jinn picked up $7.5 million. In late March, French delivery service Frichti raised $13.4 million to invest in its own infrastructure to serve more clients.

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