Rewind to when the COVID pandemic was just taking shape. Lines wrapped around corners outside grocery stores. Online orders were booked days, even weeks, in advance. Rice, pasta, soup cans, and toilet paper were hot commodities. Through it all, as consumers, our definition of convenience changed. Receiving our groceries instantly — in a matter of minutes, not hours or days — without having to wade into crowded stores or leave our Zoom call, became the ideal.

And Flink’s achieved it.

In just seven months of operations, 10-minute delivery service Flink now reaches 10 million customers across Germany, France, Austria, and the Netherlands. And, today, it is announcing a $750 million financing round at a $2.85 billion valuation. Today’s news is all the more impressive considering the unicorn only launched its first hub in February of this year and, as Handelsblatt just reported, makes it the fastest growing unicorn in Europe.

The round features participation from all existing investors and officially welcomes aboard newcomer DoorDash, the United States’ largest food ordering and delivery platform. DoorDash boasts 56% market share in the US and serves 22 million customers.

At Cherry, Flink now joins Auto1, FlixBus, flaschenpost, Cazoo, Xometry, Forto, and SellerX in our unicorn cohort. With Flink, and like for all of our unicorn investments, we’re proud to have been the founders’ first institutional supporter.

To the moon and back

Already, Flink riders have biked seven times to the moon and back, an unusual metric perhaps but one indicative of the company’s ambitions and operational successes. Flink’s founders — Oliver Merkel, Christoph Cordes, and Julian Dames — are obsessed with operational excellence, down to the seemingly smallest of details in order to ensure customer satisfaction.

Since starting as a team of just three cofounders, Flink is now a 10,000-person company, including riders. Riders are fully employed with unlimited contracts. Its services now operate across 140 hubs in more than 60 cities in four countries with plans to further expand in the new year. Bolstered by partnership with leading continental retailers like REWE Group in Germany, Flink is able to offer more than 2,500 products for customers to choose from.

“Oliver, Julian, Christoph, and their team share our operator mindset and bring a wealth of industry experience,” Prabir Adarkar, CFO of DoorDash, says. We share Prabir’s sentiment that it’s not surprising that Flink has established itself as the leader in key European markets while growing incredibly fast.

The team behind Flink has been able to achieve this through their emphasis on both the important details and the bigger picture, the latter being customer satisfaction as the predominant motivation. The company has thought through everything from waste management to driving recruitment and retention among all departments. What also continues to set Flink apart is its emphasis on technology. Tech matters a lot at Flink and has allowed the company to further differentiate, excelling at this on both the front and back end.

Giving people their time back

“We’re on a mission to give people back time and we see a continued shift of our customer’s weekly spend on groceries,” says Oliver.

Flink is no doubt at the forefront of a larger trend hinged on the customer’s desire for convenience and speed. Bringing customers their goods in a matter of minutes — not hours or days — is truly powerful.

We led Flink’s pre-seed round last year and the seed round alongside our friends at Northzone and Target Global. Given our exposure to the food delivery space, such as with Flaschenpost, and our focus on addressing consumer behavior, our hypotheses at the time were centered around:

• Changing consumer behavior: We saw a continued core shift in changing consumer behavior. Instant gratification and convenience are driving buying decisions for consumers, as evinced in particular with our portfolio company Flaschenpost.
• Back the best team: Oliver was clearly entrenched in the retail ecosystem as a Senior Partner leading the retail practice at Bain & Company. Christoph has seen how to run large scale operations at Home24, and Julian gained expertise and experience as CMO of foodora and work at Delivery Hero and Softbank. Together, they very much comprise a complementary and competitive balance. In other words, they’re simply the best team in the market.
• Massive market “underdigitized:” In Germany alone, €166 billion is spent on groceries. However, less than 1.5% of that comprises an online share, a clear indication that there was a lack of sufficient online options.

We’re so proud of what the Flink team has accomplished in under a year of operation and cannot wait to see what 2022 — and beyond — holds for them. We’re just as convinced as ever that their boldly giving people back their time, that they are the best team out there, and addressing a massive, underdigitized market.