Danish Self-funded E-Takeaway Is Going After The Big Players


E-takeaway, a Danish takeaway ordering and delivery service operating in Denmark, Lithuania and Spain already, just launched e-takeaway.lv in Latvia and is launching in Sweden in the beginning of March. The company also told ArcticStartup that they have plans to go after Hong Kong, South Africa, Pakistan, Guatemala and Moldova amongst others.

Although it is not really a startup per say, as E-takeaway.dk was founded by twin brothers Thomas and Ulrich Cort Hansen back in 2003, what is interesting here is the recent developments and rapid expansion that the company has been going through.

It took the company around five years to reach profitability, but now they have added hundreds of restaurants to their list and are planning to go big. In 2012, the profits were €165,000 and was recognized by the Danish business newspaper Børsen nominating e-takeaway as a Gazelle company, which means that it is a fast growing and profitable business whose revenues more than doubled in the last 4 years.

This is actually a rather hot and competitive area, with several players going after the global market. For instance Delivery Hero, recently raised $88 million in Series E and already operates from 14 countries. Even in their E-Takeaways home-turf, Copenhagen, we have Just-Eat that has raised $129 million dollars and is in 13 countries.

So e-takeaway has got a lot to live up to, but then again they are already in 10 countries and growing fast. Unlike many others, who focus on acquiring well-established takeaway ordering services abroad, e-takeaway.com has been expanding by building new companies from scratch, and currently there are ongoing negotiations with several new potential partners throughout the world. As the brothers noted, the initiative for expansion usually comes from entrepreneurs who want to launch food ordering services abroad together with e-takeaway as primarily a technology partner, “which is very good for finding the right partners, because then you know they are self-motivated, they are burning with desire to do this since they are approaching you” says Ulrich Cort Hansen, the CEO of e-takeaway.

Typical users of e-takeaway are quality-oriented, health-conscious individuals, who spend on average 50 euro per order they make. E-takeaway also focuses on delivering takeaway to corporate clients and public institutions and provides company accounts for them.

The plans of E-takeaway for the coming years are pretty impressive. They are going to refocus in Denmark and start competing on price with Just-eat for low-end customers through the mobile app. They are also preparing a tablet app which will substitute the current order receiving boxes installed in the restaurants and what’s most important is that they are going to enable tracking of all orders using e-takeaway, not just those delivered using e-takeaways own drivers.

It is impressive how a family funded company that has bootstrapped to profitability is taking on the big players without raising huge amounts of funding. The brothers say that during the last couple of years a few business angels a year approached them, but “so far nothing interesting enough came out of it.”

”Currently, e-takeaway is in the process of allocating up to €1 million in capital financing to further rapid growth throughout both Denmark and other countries, which could be obtained through the current cash flow of e-takeaway, a growth loan, a growth foundation or even from venture capital, where we’re considering different scenarios.”- said Thomas Cort Hansen, the CEO of e-takeaway.