Deliver it now — Creandum backs next-generation grocer Dija

Carl Fritjofsson
Creandum
Published in
3 min readMar 5, 2021

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At Creandum, we have a sweet spot for big markets. With an ever-growing world population, the food market is undoubtedly one of them. The first food investment made by the Creandum funds was Linas Matkasse, one of the original meal kit delivery services, that inspired today’s market leader Hello Fresh. In 2012, we backed Vivino, today’s biggest wine marketplace, and in 2016 the funds invested into the grocery delivery service Cornershop that became Uber for groceries.

Another four years later, with new customer habits and needs emerging, we scanned the entire European continent to find what the next-generation online grocery business can look like. And we’re pleased to confirm: We found it!

The idea of saving time by ordering your groceries online instead of having to trek to a supermarket, push a shopping cart down aisle after aisle, then wait in the checkout line, is not something new. But the pandemic for obvious reasons certainly caused a shift in consumer behaviours making online groceries truly mass market. How can tech further innovate this model? What do customers demand from the next generation of online grocery delivery services? It’s actually fairly simple. Customers want to get the products they ordered at the time they need them. This means FAST delivery and NO REPLACEMENTS.

🍫 Meet Dija.

No matter if you have an impulsive need for chocolate, need to top up your basics, urgently need a few extra avocados for your guac, or plan a big dinner party Dija will deliver to your door within 10 (!) minutes guaranteeing stock availability.

Dija is able to do this by redefining the entire grocery stack. They operate a network of purpose-built hyper-local “dark warehouses” across the city which gives them the ability to deliver with an incredible speed. Each hub will carry more than 2,000 products from trusted grocery brands and gives customers the ability to stock up on anything you would expect from a grocer.

💚 Love at first sight.

As a VC, we speak to many founders every day. We are often impressed by founders in a first meeting but building conviction as an early-stage investor requires time and effort in terms of analysis and getting to know the team. However, our first meeting the Dija founders Alberto and Yusuf was different. They confirmed the Disney myth that there is such a thing as love at first sight. We were instantly amazed and truly in awe.

Why?

Alberto and Yusuf have the most relevant background experience you can think of for pursuing an opportunity like this. They combine executive roles from Deliveroo where they’ve seen what on-demand at scale looks like. They also built not one but two different type of online grocers in the past with immense operational learnings and understandings of the market. Finally, the two founders are some of the most ambitious and bold people we’ve ever met. Nothing is too big and the upside is literally infinite, and their hyper-speed of execution is the ultimate testament to this.

Today, we are beyond excited to add Dija to the #CreandumFamily and couldn’t be more proud to join our friends at Blossom and Index Ventures, in Dija’s $20M Seed round.

Want to be part of shaping the next-gen of groceries? Dija is hiring! 🛒🚀

Read more about their latest launch in London on Techcrunch or Sifted.

Never carry your grocery bags again!

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