Berlin-based food delivery service HelloFresh has raised a fresh $88.5 million (€85 million) in a recent funding round as it is possibly gearing up for an Initial Public Offering (IPO).
The round details were revealed by HelloFresh-backer Rocket Internet on Monday valuing the company at about $2.09 billion (€2 billion). The valuation dropped by 20 per cent from the last publicly stated $2.9 billion.
This round brings the total amount raised by HelloFresh to almost $360 million. It has secured over $270 million in funding in several rounds from investors that also include Insight Venture Partners and Phenomen Ventures. It nabbed $149 million in February 2015, mainly from Rocket. Then in September 2015, it went on to raise another $85 million in a round led by Baillie Gifford, a Scottish investment firm.
According to the latest report, Baillie participated in the new round along with an undisclosed investor. The size of Rocket’s holding in HelloFresh has now dipped from 56 to 53 percent.
There were reports speculating that Rocket had wanted to take HelloFresh public in November 2015 but later delayed the plans due to skepticism over the latter’s high valuation and burn rate. However, there are signs, including the creation of an investor relations section on its website, that clearly indicate HelloFresh marching towards a 2017 IPO.
The food-delivery startup business has been stumbling for quite a while, with SpoonRocket shutting down in March and others striving hard to raise capital. HelloFresh competes against Abel & Cole, Simply Cook, Marley Spoon and the freshly funded Gousto.
The company’s revenues stood at $455.25 million for the first nine months of 2016, hiked up from $205.66 million for the same period one year ago. While losses continued to increase rising from $66.06 million for the first three-quarters of 2015 to $80.19 in 2016.
Founded by CEO Dominik Richter and COO Thomas Griesel in 2012, the recipe-kit company delivers recipes with ingredients for 3 to 5 well-balanced gourmet meals at your doorstep. It caters to more than 800,000 subscribers delivering about 7.5 million meals per month in the U.K., German, Switzerland, Netherlands, the U.S., Canada, Austria, Belgium, and Australia.
HelloFresh has recently partnered with MapR, which offers its own big data stack in the form of its Converged Data Platform. It moved its analytics to MapR’s Hadoop in order to meet the needs of its growing business and data volumes. The startup had also collaborated with British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver late last year.
