Delivery service Deliveroo has officially launched in Dublin, bringing food from more than 40 of the city's restaurants direct to your doorstep.
The move comes after the company, which is backed by Irish entrepreneur Dylan Collins, closed a €22 million round of funding earlier this year, bringing to €25 million the total amount it has raised to date. Among the investors are Accel Partners and Index Ventures. Hoxton Ventures, Mr Collins' investment vehicle, invested in the company last year.
Established services such as JustEat require restaurants to have their own delivery service; Deliveroo offers a full delivery service to restaurants.
For the customer, we’re a service that delivers meals from your favourite local, quality restaurants in 32 minutes,” said Anis Harb, country manager with Deliveroo.
“We typically work with quality restaurants that don’t offer delivery, whose selection is particularly exciting. We’re an end to end home delivery solution; we provide the entire infrastructure – the drivers, the technology, the ordering platform, so that restaurants can at the touch of a button, turn on incremental revenue with zero additional investment.”
Deliveroo’s restaurants are supplied with an Android tablet to access orders and change information such as preparation time and unavailable menu items, and a bluetooth printer.
"We're tapping into two inherent consumer needs: better selection and faster delivery," said Mr Harb. "We've seen it in ecommerce with Amazon, etc; now we're seeing it in food where customers are being more demanding, wanting food faster and they want a better selection of restaurants. These two combined make the 2.0 of food delivery."
The service, which will recruit more than 50 drivers over the new few months, will initially serve Dublin 2, 4 and 6, with plans to expand further in the summer. It currently has 25 delivery drivers signed up.
The company takes takes the delivery charge on orders and also takes a commission on the food order. It limits the delivery area to within 2.4km of the restaurant, to ensure that food arrives to customers fresh and as it was intended by the chefs.
Among the eateries already signed up to Deliveroo are Carluccios, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Diep Le Shaker and Little Ass Burrito Bar.
“This trend towards making luxury accessible, I think Uber has been a pretty good case in point on that,” said Mr Collins. “There’s such a good opportunity with the high end restaurants. When we started to look at the size of the market globally, if you can build out the platform that really focuses on the quality for consumers but also quality for the restaurant as well – for the chefs, the owners, the food is arriving the way they would want it to arrive – this is an amazing opportunity.”
The company set up its Irish office late last year and made its first proper delivery on March 24th. It plans to add more restaurants to its list and expand the service to areas such as Sandyford, Dundrum and Dun Laoghaire, before tackling other suburbs of the city.
A mobile app is also on the way, with the initial priority on getting the mobile web version up and running to allow access from any mobile device.
Founded in 2013 by William Shu and Greg Orlowski, the company has already made its mark on the London food scene. The company has completed more than 400,000 deliveries, and works with 1,000 restaurants in the city. Its customer base has reached more than 100,000 repeat customers, with 80 per cent of customers returning to the service again, according to Deliveroo statistics.
