Delivery startups crowding city streets across globe amid convenience mantra

LONDON — Zipping around central London, among the bikes and scooters of Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo, is a new entrant promising almost instantaneous satisfaction for your craving for a bar of chocolate or pint of ice cream: Getir, a Turkish company that says it will deliver your groceries in 10 minutes.

The speed of Getir’s deliveries, from a network of neighborhood warehouses, matches the astonishing pace of the company’s recent expansion. After 5½ years pioneering the model in Turkey, it suddenly opened in six European countries this year, bought a rival and, by the end of

2021, expects to be in at least three American cities, including New York. In just six months, Getir raised nearly $1 billion to fuel this outburst.

“We accelerated our plans to go to more countries because if we don’t, others do,” said Nazim

Salur, a founder of Getir (the word is Turkish for “bring”). “It’s a race against time.”

Salur is right to look over his shoulder. In London alone, five new rapid grocery delivery companies have taken to the streets in the past year or so. Glovo, a 6-year-old Spanish company that delivers restaurant meals as well as groceries, raised more than half a billion dollars in April, just a month after Gopuff, based in Philadelphia, raised $1.5 billion from investors, including SoftBank’s Vision Fund.

Shut at home for months on end during the pandemic, millions of people started using online grocery delivery. Delivery subscriptions for many things, including wine, coffee, flowers and pasta, surged. Investors have seized this moment and are backing companies that will bring you whatever you desire, not just soon, but within minutes.

Rapid grocery delivery is the next step in the wave of venture capital-subsidized luxury serving a generation used to ordering taxi services in minutes, vacationing in cheap villas through Airbnb and having ever more entertainment available on demand.

“This is not just for the rich, the affluent, who have money to waste,” Salur said. “It’s a very cheap way of treating yourself.”

The road to profitability has been elusive in the food delivery industry. But that hasn’t stopped venture capitalists from investing about $14 billion in online delivery grocery businesses since the start of 2020, according to data from PitchBook. This year alone, Getir has completed three funding rounds.

Is Getir profitable? “Yes and no,” Salur said. After a year or two, a neighborhood can be profitable, he said, which is not to say the company as a whole has been profitable yet.

Alex Frederick, an analyst at PitchBook who studies the food technology sector, said this industry looked like it was going through a period of blitzscaling, a term coined by Reid Hoffman, who helped build PayPal and found LinkedIn, to describe a company racing to serve a global customer base before any of its competitors. And right now, there is a lot of competition without much variation among the companies, Frederick added.

“It’s a race to get market share at the expense of profitability,” he said.

But it has been a busy year. Until 2021, Getir had operated only in Turkey. This year, in addition to the cities in England, Getir has expanded to Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin. At the start of July, Getir made its first acquisition: Blok, another grocery delivery company, which operated in Spain and Italy.

“It’s growth, growth, growth,” Salur said. “That’s what we breathe at the moment.”