London’s 15-minute grocery delivery firm Weezy plots UK-wide expansion with $20 million in new funding

A start-up that offers to deliver groceries to customers’ doors within 15 minutes has raised $20 million (£14.6 million) in Series A funding to expand UK-wide. 

Weezy, which bills itself as a hyper-local “superfast supermarket”, was only launched last summer in reponse to the pandemic-fuelled demand for home food and other deliveries. In the second quarter of 2020, half a million new shoppers were added to the grocery delivery sector. It is now worth £14.3 billion in the UK.

Its deliveries are made on bikes or electric mopeds. 

Founders Kristof Van Beveren and Alec Dent, who currently operate in London only from  four warehouses, said they will use the newly-raised funds to open 40 new “fulfilment centres” across the UK by the end of 2021. 

They also plan to expand head office, creating 50 new London-based management roles in the coming months. 

The Weezy team said today that they had secured funding from venture capital firms including New York-based fund Left Lane Capital, and UK-based funds DN Capital and Heartcore Capital.

Left Lane’s managing partner, Harley Miller, is joining the start-up’s board. 

Van Beveren said: “People are no longer happy to wait around for deliveries, and there is strong demand for a more efficient service. 

"This new funding round will allow us to expand the team and our footprint to bring Weezy to more customers across the UK.”

The news comes after a year of major shake-up in the home-delivery market, with Amazon’s Prime service now offering free delivery on grocery orders of £40 or more, and smaller platforms such as Farmdrop seeing huge increases in custom.