Allset, a Ukrainian-founded meal ordering startup now headquartered in Silicon Valley, has just raised a $8.25 million Series B round. The EBRD led the round, joined by Andreessen Horowitz (San Francisco), Greycroft (New York City), SMRK VC Fund (Ukraine) and Inovo Venture Partners (Poland).
As reported by Tech Crunch, the startup was hoping to secure as much as $12 million, but the covid crisis led to close a smaller round as “a few investors just disappeared.”
In pre-covid times, Allset’s pre-ordering platform was meant to connect local restaurants to busy diners. The company claimed to offer “an everyday dining experience that is easy, frictionless, and healthy with the help of advanced technology.”
“In recent quarters, the company had seen its sharpest growth in busy urban centers, in particular New York’s financial district. Some neighborhoods were logging year-over-year growth of over 600% for the app, which allows people to preorder meals mostly at fast-casual restaurants for either takeout or dine-in,” notes CrunchBase.
Last month, however, as social distancing measures went into place, orders dropped by around 60%.
Thus, “the pandemic caused – at least in the near term – a monumental shift in Allset’s focus,” reported CrunchBase. “Now, neighborhoods once packed with busy office workers are virtual ghost towns. And while there’s not much takeout for offices, Allset is now seeing more demand for services in the neighborhoods where those workers live. And of course, dine-in orders, which previously accounted for just over a third of orders, have been eclipsed entirely by takeout.”
Allset was founded by Ukrainian entrepreneurs Stas Matviyenko and Anna Polishchuk in April 2015 as a continuation of their previous project Settle. The company is now headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in Kyiv (Kiev), San Francisco and New York. It partners with more than 2,500 restaurants in 11 US cities.
