Great news for Picnic: the online supermarket raised a staggering amount of 100 million euro from four wealthy-family funds NPM Capital, De Hoge Dennen, Hoyberg and Finci. It’s contending for biggest deal of the year in The Netherlands and the investment is already in the top 3 of all-time funding in Dutch startups.
The startup/scale-up, co-founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneur Michiel Muller, delivers online groceries to your home the next day of ordering. It asks no additional costs. Picnic says it had a 20 million euro revenue last year, and this year it’ll head for 100 million euro in revenue.
Picnic is active in the Utrecht area and works with one distribution center and several local hubs. This way it can save on expensive stores and deliver the goods for free. It partners with grocery concern Boni.
With the money, the company will add 70 of these hubs in The Netherlands and will open five more distribution centers. Also, Picnic plans to order “hundreds” of self-developed electric delivery vehicles. The scale-up expects to add 10.000 new jobs, mainly in delivery and in the distribution centers.
Picnic investors
The four wealthy families will now have a minority stake in Picnic. According to co-founder Joris Beckers, the company talked with several Silicon Valley VC’s and private equity funds as well – but they weren’t in it for the long term, he said to Sprout.
This big investment may be bad news for new, small competitors like Superbuddy. On the other hand, it shows that there’s a lot of interest in this market, by both investors and consumers. “It’s not about the amount, but it’s about we came across something that has phenomenal interest”, said Beckers.
Skewing numbers
This funding round will definitely skew the upcoming Q1 investment numbers in Dutch startups – let alone the 2017 figures. The only startup/scale-up to raise more money was Adyen in 2014. It raised 200 million euro in series B financing, accountable for 40 percent of the 500 million euro investments that year.
Image: Picnic on Facebook