“Wait, what?”

“You closed an investment 2 weeks after COVID-19 outbreak?”

These were some of the reactions we received after announcing this week that we led a $30M D Round for Bringg, the leading delivery orchestration platform.

With the global economy grinding to a standstill, unemployment rising, and companies basically being forced to rewrite their playbooks, it became obvious that COVID-19 wasn’t just another bump in the road that we needed to take under consideration in our investment analysis.

So why, in the midst of all this turmoil, did we decide to lead this round?

Let’s start at the end – March 2020, countries around the world are announcing quarantine. For most startups this meant very bad news. BUT – for Bringg, it was an opportunity. As Guy Bloch, the CEO of the company told us: Enterprises were always aware that a big market shift was coming, but in a matter of only a few weeks that shift has fully arrived and almost everyone has been caught off guard.

COVID-19 expedited a new reality of consumers becoming used to and reliant upon delivery. When we first started examining this company a year and a half ago, we strongly believed in the thesis that the market would eventually reach this stage, and we were confident in the TAM, the excellence, and execution of the team.

Though in the past that might have been sufficient for us to pull the trigger, we’re now forced to re-examine our investment through the lens of COVID-19, and to analyze the company’s performance before, during, and after the crisis.

PRE COVID-19

We’re living in a ‘delivery economy’ era. Many businesses are challenged with the task of building a sustainable delivery model that can enable them to “free” themselves from the Amazon bear hug and sell directly to their customers. They’re doing this for 3 main reasons: to own the customer experience, to take full control of their data, and ultimately to increase revenues.

Bringg has spent the last 7 years building exactly that. In an age where Amazon is dominating the global delivery market worth $6.4B ($2.1B in the US alone), Bringg’s platform uses powerful technology that frees enterprises and SMBs and enables them to scale quickly with new delivery options and third-party fleets, orchestrating, managing, measuring and tracking their entire delivery ecosystem.

Bringg allows customers to take back ownership of their delivery experience.

Executing on this ambitious vision, the company has demonstrated 100% YOY growth over the last 3 years, and multi-year deals with high-profile customers across different verticals (restaurants, groceries, retail, logistics, services, and health). To name a few – Coca Cola, Walmart, and Auto Zone.

 

Enter COVID-19

In a world that is increasingly confined indoors amid ever-tightening restrictions on public movement, delivery service has shifted from yet another channel to “mission critical” for brand survival. E-commerce was already on the rise recently, as 2019 showed an 11.9% increase year over year, But the Coronavirus has spurred that transformation further and faster than anyone could have predicted – In the two days since an emergency was declared on March 11, e-commerce as a whole jumped 25% according to index provided by Adobe, and e-commerce sales from pure-play ecommerce retailers were up 34% YoY in the US and Canada.

All this just provided more proof of the need for Bringg’s solution – during recent weeks, the company has seen important delivery verticals jump: groceries are up 80% over the last 30 days, while restaurant delivery volumes are up 54% over the same time period.
With the increased demand from the market, Bringg also quickly rolled out a number of initiatives such as contactless delivery and BringgNOW, a free delivery solution to SMBs.

For us as investors, this proved not only market potential but the team’s agility and capacity to not only survive but thrive, even amid a global crisis.

POST COVID-19

With the outbreak of COVID-19, the delivery market has, in a matter of weeks, seen adoption that was predicted to occur in a few years’ time. Will that continue when things get back to normal?

We believe this era will change social and economic behavior dramatically. People that have experienced the easiness and comfort of E-comm will find it hard “to go back” to how things were.

In a March survey of consumers who purchased groceries online, many of them for the first time, 43% said they are either “extremely likely” or “very likely” to stick with online grocery buying in the future.

This will become the “new normal”, and customers will demand it from brands.

I believe that enterprises that will use this time to prepare the infrastructure for this “delivery economy” will come out strong. And for this reason, now more than ever, Bringg has the potential to transform the delivery market and be a market leader.

Lior, Guy and the rest of the Bringg employees – welcome to the Viola family.

2020 – Bringg it on!