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Take Eat Easy is shutting down its food delivery business as Uber muscles in
Take Eat Easy
Take Eat Easy, the Belgium-founded food delivery startup, is shutting down after running out of money to sustain itself.
Founded in 2013, Take Eat Easy struggled to raise a new round of funding in recent weeks and is going into administration as a result.
The company will cease trading from July 26 2016 and is looking for a buyer.
Take Eat Easy raised €16 million (£13 million) last year but it needed more in order to compete with the huge marketing budgets of companies like Uber and Deliveroo, who have raised $12.5 billion (£10 billion) and $200 million (£152 million) respectively.
The Brussels-headquartered company, which employs 160 people (including 20 in London), reached a significant landmark in its history last week, achieving 1 million deliveries across the four markets it operates in (France, Belgium, Spain, and the UK) but it was still operating at a loss.
"We haven’t been able to raise additional capital to fuel the company until break-even," wrote Take Eat Easy CEO and cofounder Adrien Roose in a blog post on Medium on Tuesday. "We’ve started working on our Series C in October 2015. We knew we had to gear up as one of our own investor [Rocket Internet] acquired and invested aggressively in a direct competitor, now Foodora, and Deliveroo had just raised a massive round of funding. Unfortunately for us, they raised and announced an even bigger round a couple of weeks later. That didn’t help."
Roose said that after being rejected by 114 VC funds he finally landed a €30 million (£25 million) Series C funding round with a French, state-owned logistics group in March. However, this funding was recently pulled.
Take Eat Easy"Unfortunately, after 3 months of intensive due diligence, their board rejected the deal and they ended up withdrawing their offer," said Roose. "We were negotiating with them under an exclusivity agreement, didn’t have a plan B, and only had a couple of weeks of run-way left.
"For the last 8 weeks, we’ve desperately tried to find solutions to keep the business alive. We’ve worked on both financing and acquisitions deals in parallel, unfortunately none of them materialised. We have now ran out of time to keep operating business as usual, and are filing for judicial restructuring."
Take Eat Easy allowed people to get food from popular restaurants delivered to their homes and offices via an iOS app, an Android app, and Take Eat Easy's website. Like Deliveroo, the company would use an army of cyclists and moped drivers to deliver the food. Also like Deliveroo, the company would charge restaurants around 30% of the overall bill and customers €2.50/£2.50 per delivery.
It began in Brussels before expanding to a total of 20 cities including the likes of Paris, Madrid, and London. On the day it shut down, Roose said Take Eat Easy had 3,200 restaurants on the platform and 350,000 customers.
Speaking to Business Insider at the time of the Take Eat Easy London launch, Roose said he thought there was room for Deliveroo and Take Eat Easy to coexist, adding that there was no shortage of cyclists and moped riders. It's possible that the expansion of UberEATS into Europe has changed all that. Indeed, Uber was even trying to poach Take Eat Easy's couriers ahead of its launch in London last month.
Take Eat Easy
The news will also come as a blow to Take Eat Easy's existing investors, which includes Rocket Internet, DN Capital, Piton Capital, and Eight Road Ventures, among others.
Chloé Roose, Take Eat Easy cofounder, wrote her own heart-felt blog post on Medium where she says "it’s hard to find the right words to describe an ending that today still seems unreal."
Take Eat Easy UK MD Ed Barrow told Business Insider: "The staffs' tenure is being dealt with by the administrators who will adhere to local legal obligations in each territory."
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SEE ALSO: Uber tries to poach Take Eat Easy riders
