Buymie’s grocery delivery platform raises €5.8m

On Sunday (14 June), Irish same-day grocery delivery start-up Buymie announced that it has raised an additional €5.8m in funding, bringing the total raised by the company this year to over €8m.

The latest investment round, which follows a €2.2m investment made in April 2020, was led by a new investor Wheatsheaf Group. Wheatsheaf Group is the food and agriculture investment arm of the Grosvenor Estate.

There was also follow-on investment from existing backers, including Act Venture Capital, Sure Valley Ventures, Haatch Ventures and the Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN). Other notable investors include former Unilever chief marketing and communications officer Keith Weed and Scott Weavers Wright, the former managing director of Morrisons.com.

The funding round

The latest funding round will drive national and international expansion for Buymie, allowing the company to focus on its mission of reducing the environmental impact of grocery shopping.

Buymie wants to limit the use of secondary plastic packaging, reduce private car journeys and design incentive programmes to help facilitate a switch to electric vehicles.

Buymie co-founder and CEO Devan Hughes said that the funding round will help the start-up achieve its goal of becoming the “leading” same-day grocery delivery provider across the UK and Ireland.

Hughes said: “More and more customers are frustrated by the long waiting times offered by conventional grocery delivery services and delighted with our solution that can deliver groceries in as little as one hour.”

He said that the success of the start-up’s partnership with Lidl has demonstrated how much appetite there is for a same-day delivery service.

Over the last 18 months, the start-up has expanded its business to meet the increasing demand for grocery home delivery, a trend which has accelerated dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As well as partnering with Lidl, the company also recently announced a deal with UK supermarket Co-op in May 2020. The start-up said that these partnerships enable supermarkets to compete with the likes of Amazon, which has goals to lead in same-day grocery. The deal with Co-op was Buymie’s first expansion outside of Ireland.