Softbank Ventures Korea and Qualcomm Ventures invest into last-mile online delivery service “Naldo”

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2014년 07월 16일 beSUCCESS

Naldo today announced its Series A investment from Softbank Ventures Korea and Qualcomm Ventures. After an initial angel funding in 2013 this is the first major investment for Naldo. Funding will allow for faster scaling along sales, marketing and product-development. Currently Naldo's service is available in and around the Seoul metropolitan area in South Korea.

Naldo provides immediate delivery of any item that needs to get delivered within a maximum time-frame of 90 minutes via a browser-based online ordering-system. The existing offline instant-delivery market in Korea (“quick-service” in Korean) is currently worth $5 Bn USD with thousands of small local providers carving up the market. Until now, no single player has emerged as a market leader, and this is the gap Naldo aims to fill. "The industry still runs under the same structure as 10 years ago with many pain-points for customers, such as late-deliveries, bundled orders or intransparent pricing," explained Naldo CEO Ludolf Ebner-Chung.

Naldo has now developed what Ebner-Chung believes will be a more cost-efficient and convenient solution to tackle these heritage problems in the industry. Through the platform customers can easily place orders online, removing the need for phone interaction with delivery suppliers. These orders are then distributed to Naldo's vast driver-fleet via a mobile-app. Customers can easily track the status of their order via SMS messages which are sent from the company's servers. With an online platform Naldo avoids the high (variable) cost of a callcenter, allowing for much cheaper pricing and dramatically improved efficiency when scaling the service country-wide, or overseas. The service is currently used by hundreds of corporate customers and thousands of end-users throughout the metropolitan area of Seoul, and there are immediate plans to utilize their recent investment to begin scaling from their strong start.

Naldo is betting on a growing logistics trend worldwide

Naldo was founded in March 2013 by Ebner-Chung, the founder and former CEO of Delivery Hero’s Korean operation “Yogiyo”. Yogiyo is now in direct competition with the No. 1 player in the highly lucrative Korean food delivery market. German-Korean Ebner-Chung is also a former McKinsey consultant who previously worked for companies such as NCsoft, CDNetworks and LG Electronics.

Food Delivery War In Korea Heats Up, As Heavyweights Yogiyo and Baedari Minjeok Go Head to Head

Softbank Ventures Korea’s Ryan Kang comments: “We are very fond of online ordering platforms, just like Uber, Opentable or now Naldo. There are so many pain-points in this old but huge industry. We believe Naldo is the best team to fix these old problems and create a market-leading company.

Ebner-Chung added that; “In Korea people just want things immediately, that’s why the market is so huge. We have now developed an algorithm to provide a very cost-efficient way to feed into this need. At the same time we are disrupting the old offline industry. With the new investment we are going to invest heavily into customer-acquisition and customer-satisfaction.”

The market for instant-delivery is currently a hot investment-area with UK provider Shutl recently being acquired by Ebay. Other similar US providers include Deliv, Zipments and also Postmates, which either work with big shopping malls to compete against Amazon’s instant delivery option, or also offer their service directly to end-customers. Just recently TechCrunch also reported a 2 Mio USD investment into French provider “Tok Tok Tok”, who also runs the same model and also reported a similar online logistics startup “GogoVan” from Hong Kong.

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