Delivery firm Getir to expand into US after $550m funding round | Couriers/delivery industry

The fast-track grocery delivery firm Getir is set to expand into the US, France and Germany after raising more than $550m in a funding round that values the Turkish company at more than $7.5bn.

At that valuation, Getir, founded in 2015, is worth more than the takeaway courier group Deliveroo and big retailers such as Marks & Spencer and Morrisons. Investors are racing to get a foothold in the rapidly developing market for groceries which can be delivered in less than 20 minutes from local “dark stores”.

More than $14bn has been piled into the market globally since the start of last year according to analysts at PitchBook.

Gorillas, the German grocery delivery firm that launched in the UK in March, is reportedly aiming to raise $1bn in a deal that would value the company at over $6bn despite having only operated for just over a year.

Berlin-based Flink also announced on Friday that it had raised $240m to expand its business into more cities and countries.

Such services, which include Gorillas, Weezy, Dija and Fancy, are seen as pandemic winners, with numerous high-street lockdowns around the world spurring a big rise in online shopping, particularly in groceries. In the UK, more than 13% of weekly food shopping is now online, up from 7% before Covid-19 arrived in the country.

In the race to sign up shoppers, millions has been spent on marketing efforts including money-off vouchers, big advertising campaigns and free delivery.

Getir, which already serves 25 cities in Turkey, launched in the UK in February this year. It began operating in Amsterdam last month and has plans to open in Birmingham and Manchester in the coming months. It aims to have reached between 15 and 20 UK cities including Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow by the end of the year.

The company said on Friday that it planned to launch in Paris and Berlin in the next few weeks and would begin operations in several US cities by the end of this year.

“Our model and approach to ultrafast delivery is thriving and this latest round of funding further enables us to deliver our best-in-class service,” said Nazim Salur, the founder of Getir.

Getir has raised $1bn since the beginning of the year, with this latest round coming just three months after it raised $300m in a deal that valued the group at $2.6bn.

Existing investors include Tiger Global, an early backer of Facebook, LinkedIn and Peloton, and Sequoia Capital, an investor in Google and Apple. Others include: Silver Lake, which backed Airbnb and Klarna; DisruptAD, which is backed by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund; and the Emirati state-owned fund Mubadala Investment Company.