Contxto – Let’s Eat, a foodtech “cloud canteen” that delivers personalized meals to office workers as an alternative to companies setting up their own canteens, has closed a pre-Series A round.
The round was led by Fink Ventures, alongside EMAN (Emerging Markets Angel Network) and a handful of other strategic angel investors in the space.
The money will be used to launch new verticals within Let’s Eat’s current customer base and expand its offering within industrial zones, hospitality, and education.
Our core market has always been corporate offices within metropolitan areas. But as home offices are the norm for the foreseeable future, we are leveraging our mobile ordering, pre-pay technology and robust last mile delivery capacities to expand our offering.
Ronni Samir, CEO of LetsEast
Monterrey Jack-of-all-trades
Co-Founders, Ronni Samir and Hussein Fawzi—LetsEat’s CEO and COO, respectively—, are both from Sweden but chose to move to Mexico after graduating from university to found LetsEat.
Samir did an exchange at the Tec de Monterrey, a high-ranking Mexican university, as an undergrad and fell in love with the city and with Mexico in general.
The Monterrey link for LetsEat is thus twofold. It’s the first launch city for LetsEat and where the team is based.
The startup launched late in 2018 as a “virtual food court” or “smart cloud canteen”. It functions as an employment benefit for employees, connecting food suppliers and restaurants with office workers at companies, in addition to arranging delivery.
However, the global pandemic forces a hard pivot on the company within its first year of existence.
Can’t canteen? Let’s Eat says “let’s decentralize!”
Covid has forced an interesting pivot on the company, but interestingly the company was perfectly positioned to do so; both geographically as well as technologically.
LetsEat is a hybrid dark kitchen-as-a-service startup, as well as a last-mile delivery cloud canteen. Though perhaps it could no longer cater to office workers, the vast industrial parks in Monterrey that simply couldn’t work from home suddenly became low-hanging fruit.
By automating and decentralizing delivery at these places, LetsEat’s services drastically reduced the waiting times and congestion of people in the food halls. Making its convenient system a health benefit, as well as a nice-to-have meal service.
The results have been apparent, with orders at a large industrial-sites have been by 14 percent monthly.
The startup hopes to translate this success as people return to the office, but continue to socially distance. I call it a safety measure, Let’s Eat calls it:
“A welcome back to work perk.”
-AG
