While the concept of fulfilling online orders by bike was introduced in New York City by Amazon and Uber only within recent months, it already has early practitioners in Ukraine. Founded in November 2014 by entrepreneurs Daniel Tonkopiy and Sergey Danylenko, DelFast delivers goods weighing up to 7kg by electric bicycles for online retailers and private individuals.
The low cost (40 hryvnia, or approximately $2.2) and speed of delivery (up to 1 hour) are the primary competitive advantages that DelFast holds, notes Ukrainian tech blog AIN.UA.
According to the founders, DelFast currently regularly serves more than 30 online retailers. “They have all abandoned standard courier services and now only use our courier services for delivery in Kyiv (Kiev). This means that we are working well,” says Tonkopiy. In his words, sales rose by 30% in January over the previous month, even though December was the holiday sales peak and January has many “sleepy weekends.”
Earlier this week, the startup announced an investment deal worth $250,000 with Imperious Group, an international venture fund with Russian origins. The details of the deals have not been disclosed, but AIN.UA believes that the fund’s stake is somewhere between 15-25%.
Investment is needed for the project to be able to increase their output and connect to major e-commerce players like Rozetka.ua, Sokol.ua and Modnakasta.ua with whom the startup is currently in discussions. The investment will also be used to increase their fleet of electric bicycles to 50. According to Tonkopiy, one such bicycle, capable of travelling up to 120km on a single charge, costs from $1200-1500.
At Imperious Group, the idea of delivering packages within an hour, as proposed by DelFast, is called “very interesting, economically stable, and, most importantly, potentially quickly scalable.”
“Delivery in Ukraine is currently a big pain for both ordinary consumers and for online retailers. The quality of delivery sometimes plays an important role in their image and attitudes towards their service. Daniel has also grasped a business model which has become self-sustaining within a month and now shows the strongest growth in traffic. He has built a great foundation for development and our investment should speed up the growth process,” Kirill Mazur, analyst for the fund, said to AIN.UA.
