MyChef To Enter Finland With New Backing

The top Estonian food delivery startup Mychef has received investment from larger Lithuanian peer Foodout and plans to enter highly-competitive Finnish market during this year.
The deal will give Foodout presence in every town of more than 100,000 inhabitants in three Baltic countries. “This is the first such link-up in the Baltic region, where, previously, cultural and linguistic differences prevented consolidation in the market sector.
Foodout took a stake in Mychef with the deal, but declined to specify the size of the investment or the shareholding. “We are in a long-term partnership and Mychef will preserve its brand in Estonia and likely in Finland as well,” Eugene Birman, co-founder  of Mychef, told ArcticStartup.

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MyChef delivery van looking north.

Birman said the new backing will help 2012-founded Mychef to enter this fall also hyper-competitive Finnish market where Foodora and Wolt are already strong players.
“With Foodout as our partner, we’re excited about finally putting into practice new ideas and services in the Tallinn market, then taking what we’ve learned and opening in Helsinki with a bang. We have a completely novel concept we’re excited to reveal for that soon,” said Birman.

The focus would be on primarily serving high-end B2B and B2C customers, utilizing a customer service-focused model. “We’re not going to compete with them on price, speed, service, any of that. We are going into the market asymmetrically. All I can say about this is that there are new angles and we are aiming only for the #1 spot. People eat every day and we want to conquer Finnish bellies just as we did in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,” Birman told ArcticStartup.

Foodout is backed by Goldfish Fund, an early stage venture capital firm in so-called Frontier markets. On top of three Baltic countries it has also a joint venture in Iran.