After a challenging few months that included closing markets, instant grocery delivery company JOKR told TechCrunch it raised about $50 million in a Series C investment on a $1.3 billion post-money valuation.
The funding, which The Information first reported that JOKR was seeking last September, follows a $260 million raise announced in November 2021. However, with the valuation the company is getting a slight bump, up from the $1.2 billion pre-money valuation from the Series B.
“It’s not a huge uptake in terms of valuation, and obviously something that, despite the market correction, still shows that we’ve been able to build traction to grow and to become more profitable,” JOKR co-founder and CEO Ralf Wenzel told TechCrunch. “Otherwise, those terms would not have been justifiable. We’re happy about the fact that we closed the Series C round, and it comes at an increased valuation from new and existing investors.”
The new investment was buoyed by existing investors, with G Squared leading the round and GGV Capital, Tiger Global Management and HV Capital participating. In total, JOKR has raised $480 million in equity and debt since being founded in 2021.
Wenzel went after the new funding “to make sure that we have a fully funded business plan and that we can become fully self-sustainable and don’t have to be more dependent on external capital.”
It has indeed been quite a roller coaster ride for the company in the last year. In its report, The Information said that JOKR was losing $10 million a month. Ralf Wenzel confirmed the company is “still losing money,” but that this figure included countries and cities in which it no longer operates, so the losses have narrowed to single-digit millions of dollars each month currently.
JOKR hit gross-profit status last April, but was swept into the challenging economic environment that affected the instant grocery delivery sector, stemming in part by people returning to grocery shopping in person as the pandemic eased, a slowdown in venture capital investments and the war in Ukraine.
As such, at the beginning of summer 2022, the company cited “global economic uncertainty” as the reason for announcing it would shutter its New York and Boston deliveries. Then this month, it officially left Colombia after previously closing locations in Medellin and Santiago, Chile in November. The company continues to operate in Brazil, Mexico and Peru, but is discussing strategic options for both markets to foster its focus on the Brazilian market, according to Ralf Wenzel.
The decisions derived from an ongoing assessment of its different business units, and a determination of where JOKR has the best chance at balancing growth and profitability, Wenzel said.
“It’s not a ‘winner takes all market’,” he said, but more like a “’winner takes most market’,” he added.
