Founders of 10-minute grocery app Gorillas back London ‘dark kitchen’ start-up
The co-founders of 10-minute grocery delivery app Gorillas have backed a new start-up building “dark kitchens” around London.
Ronny Shibley, Jörg Kattner and Felix Chrobog, who was also a GM for Deliveroo, have taken part in a £3 million “seed” funding round for Growth Kitchen. The investment was led by PactVC.
Growth Kitchen partners with restaurant chains like Tortilla to outsource their recipes to “dark kitchens” in areas where they don’t have restaurants, letting them offer delivery in new areas. It currently has sites in Balham and Bermondsey and wants to open 40 more locations in the next two years.
Co-founder Máté Kun said: “We’ve accepted cooking as the norm for too long. Building on the success of food delivery apps, we are introducing a step-change in how we eat.”
Growth Kitchen claims its service can help restaurants grow “like a software company” and use data to work out areas where expansion would make sense.
Shibley, a Gorillas co-founder, said: “Where Gorillas can deliver groceries to your door in 10-minutes, the logical next step would be to go into restaurant food. Within 5-minutes of visiting one of Growth Kitchen’s hubs, I knew I had finally found the team that had cracked the delivery kitchen model.”
Founded in Germany in 2020, Gorillas is already worth over $1 billion (£760 million) and is said to be seeking to raise $500 million at a $5 billion valuation. It has expanded rapidly across Europe, offering super-fast grocery delivery in cities like London.
