Wolt continues their mission to get rid of queuing at restaurants

    Dreaming about grabbing a quick afterwork beer at a terrace on a sunny day, but skipping the lines? Wolt, a Finnish food pickup app available in over 200 restaurants, expands their app to cover some of Helsinki’s most popular summer terraces – And announces a partnership with Finland’s biggest pizza chain.

    We got a full feed of news today from Helsinki-based startup Wolt as they announced partnering with the Finnish pizza chain Kotipizza, launching Wolt application for Android and adding home delivery feature in the app.

    After these news, Wolt is available in over 200 restaurants and coffee places in Helsinki and Turku region – including few summer terraces such as Mattolaituri, where ordering drinks is now possible straight from the table with the app. All you need to do is to get the beverage from the counter when you’ll receive a notification on your phone that your order is ready to go.

    We actually played around with the geographic mean of the restaurants’ distance from Wolt‘s office this April two weeks after their launch, and found out back then that most of the restaurants available in the app were located few blocks away from their office in downtown Helsinki. Now the situation is gonna change as the partnership with Kotipizza widens the geographical scope of the app basically to whole Finland (with over 150 Kotipizza restaurants).

    “These changes raise the amount of the potential users exponentially,” says Juhani Mykkänen, one of the six co-founders of Wolt. Until now Wolt has been useful for people using iPhones in the city center of Helsinki. Now any Finn with an iPhone or Android phone having Kotipizza nearby can use Wolt,” Mykkänen continues. The company also estimates that launching Wolt for Android widens the reach of the service to over 80% of the Finnish mobile phone users.

    And good news for those who wonder if adding new features, like the home delivery option for restaurants, slows down the process of making your order through the app – Wolt hasn’t changed their goal to help the users order meals conveniently. Timewise, this means in regular user’s case aiming to finish the order in less than 10 seconds with the app.

    Also restaurants define themselves if they have home delivery available in the app. In Helsinki, Italian restaurant chain Dennis and lunch service Meal.fi offer home delivery opportunity at the moment. Also in Kotipizza‘s case, food ordered through the app can be enjoyed either at the spot, as take-away or delivered straight to one’s home.

    New addition to the investor team

    Wolt released a bunch of big news during this Tuesday morning while they also announced that their team of investors, including investment companies Inventure and Lifeline Ventures, is growing with angel investor Poju Zabludowicz.

    Ilkka Kivimäki, the chairman of Wolt, emphasizes that they’re proud to have internationally well-known business man Zabludowicz as a supporter of the company. “When Poju is looking out from the window towards Time Square of his own skyscraper in New York, it’s crystal clear that there’s networks and opportunities,” Kivimäki says.

    The company’s investors also include names such as Risto Siilasmaa (Founder of F-Secure and Chairman of Nokia), Pii Ketvel (CEO of Marcol Capital Europe) and Supercell co-founders Visa Forstén and Ilkka Paananen (through Lifeline Ventures).