Yummy, a Venezuela-based delivery app on a mission to create the nifty app for the country, announced Friday it raised $4 million in funding to expand its dark store delivery operations across Latin America. Funding backers included Y Combinator, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, Canary, Hustle Fund, Necessary Ventures, and the co-founders of TaskUs. The total investment includes pre-seeding capital raised in 2020. “This appears to be a contrarian bet, but Yummy has quickly become the No. 1 super app in Venezuela and proven that the team can scale the business in a difficult territory,” Mateen said. “Vicente and the rest of the Yummy team will expand into more traditional markets with the necessary experience and support to overcome inevitable challenges they will face.”
Vicente Zavarce, Yummy’s founder and CEO, launched the company in 2020 and is currently part of Y Combinator’s summer 2021 cohort. Born in Venezuela, Zavarce came to the U.S. for school and stayed to work in growth marketing at Postmates, Wayfair, and Getaround before starting Yummy. Zavarce was a remote CEO, stuck in the U.S. due to travel restrictions, but said he had been making the most of it over the past year. Yummy’s app can be downloaded for free, and the company charges a delivery or merchant fee. In contrast to some of his food delivery competitors, Zavarce told TechCrunch Yummy’s prices are “the lowest in the market,” so they do not affect the merchant’s ability to use the app.
The company is pulling together additional critical components for its super app strategy, including launching a ridesharing vertical this year. Yummy has already connected over 1,200 merchants with hundreds of thousands of customers. And over the past year, the company completed more than 600,000 deliveries of food, groceries, alcohol, and shopping. It reached $1 million in gross merchandise volume while growing 38% monthly revenue. Over the past eight years, the political and economic challenges faced by the country have led to its recent adoption of the U.S. dollar, Zavarce said. In some cases, up to 70% of transactions happen in dollars on the ground. He said this had protected the business against hyperinflation and ultimately created the opportunity for startups to begin operating in Venezuela.
Because of that, combined with more consumer technology innovation over the past decade, Zavarce said there is no reason why Venezuela should not have the best last-mile logistics. There, Yummy has an opportunity to connect multiple vertices into a nifty app with little to no competition. “Eventually, other players will enter, but because we have a super app, we already have an amazing frequency of usage,” he added. “We also already have exclusivity with 60% of the food delivery marketplace, which has enabled us to build a moat around the market. We believe we are the right people to execute this and feel it is our responsibility.” Plans for the new funding include user acquisition — the company has close to 200,000 registered users already — and to expand in Peru and Chile by August. At the same time, Zavarce will spend some of that capital to attract more users across Venezuela. He also expects to be in Ecuador and Bolivia by the end of the year.
