Catering marketplace CaterWings raises €6 million to boost European expansion

**Exclusive:** London-by-way-of Berlin startup CaterWings, an online marketplace for catering services and part of Rocket Internet, has raised €6 million from Holtzbrinck Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures, and Rocket Internet.

It launched in Amsterdam this week and is already active in Berlin, Hamburg, London, and Munich. The new funds will be used to further its launch in more European cities. “There are a couple of German cities that we’re looking at,” said cofounder Alexander Brunst.

“We assess a lot of relevant cities on their potential using a couple of metrics, doing some pretesting and questionnaires,” he said. “Once the decision has been made we go about talking to potential partners and caterers to get the supply side of the business up before we contact customers."

The startup is primarily focused on B2B catering. London has approximately 100 caterers on the service and Berlin has 50, said Brunst, but it said the startup is focused on quality rather than quantity. This new round of funding will also be invested in growing its online presence and improving the customer service.

“We aim to bring the entire catering business into the digital age. Currently it’s still running like 20 years ago, very telephone-based, and that also requires a lot of investment to build the right platform and make it easy for any customer to place an order for 50 or 100 people.”