As I noted earlier this month in my roundup of the 20 largest funding rounds in European tech in 2014, three of the companies listed compete with one another in the hot online food ordering and delivery space.
Those three companies include German companies Delivery Hero and Foodpanda, which have raised a combined total of more than $600 million in funding last year. The third contender in the ranking is a Dutch company called Takeaway.com, which made a splash last year by securing $103 million in a single financing round while announcing its takeover of German rival Lieferando in one fell swoop.
At the recent Web Summit in Dublin, I caught up with Takeaway.com CEO Jitse Groen, who founded the company roughly 15 years ago with a startup capital of about 50 euros.
By now, Groen told me, Takeaway.com may still be considered a Dutch company but half of its employees are in fact German. Part of that has to do with the aforementioned acquisition, but it's also because Germany is the largest economy in Europe and a huge market for online food ordering, and Takeaway.com wants to rule supreme.
Interestingly, Groen said one of the most important things he's learned in the past 15 years is to keep in mind that no one country is the same when you're expanding internationally, and that entrepreneurs shouldn't assume business will the same once they start crossing borders and will need to reinvent themselves constantly.
Asked about the intense competition in the food ordering and delivery space, Groen said he thinks we're already in a phase of consolidation, and that the four largest players will be more likely to acquire smaller national-level players rather than seek to combine forces between them in the future.
(Featured image/illustration: Dana Zemack)
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