Miami — A week after announcing the close of an $18 million dollar round, Yummy, the Venezuelan food delivery and ride sharing app, acquired Yaigo, the Postmates-like service from Bolivia that also operates in Paraguay.
Yummy, whose founder lives in California, but operates the company in LatAm, has been on a tear recently. The company is just one year old, and in addition to completing Y Combinator this summer, in July 2021 the company raised $4 million, followed by their $18 million round just three months later. The company has raised a total of $33 million to date according to Pitchbook. Yummy also claims to have more than 450,000 registered users and with the launch of Yummy Rocket - their fast delivery service - they’ll be able to deliver more than 2000 items in 15 minutes or less. Yummy recently expanded to Peru and Chile and consider themselves a “super app,” as they also do ride sharing.
The Yaigo deal happened in a matter of days; I was working on a story about Yaigo’s expansion to Chile when I got the call regarding the acquisition news.
“We’re halting our expansion to Chile and will instead work with the Yummy team that’s already in that country,” said Ariel Valverde, CEO and co-founder of Yaigo.
The two companies did not disclose the value of the deal. Yaigo, which stands for “You ask, I go,” launched in Bolivia in May of 2019 and has been operating as a food delivery startup. The company expanded to Paraguay, because unlike many other LatAm startups, they’ve decided to focus on underserved markets - and cities - in the region, which is also part of Yummy’s DNA.
“The Yaigo team has executed flawlessly and were able to bootstrap their way to 5,000 daily orders. We share the vision of connecting underserved LatAm. After expanding into Peru and Chile we couldn’t imagine a better way to enter Bolivia and Paraguay than with a team of local entrepreneurs,” said Vicente Zavarce, CEO of Yummy.
Through the acquisition, and Yummy Rocket, the Yaigo team, which consists of 78 people, will open various dark stores - stores that are not open to the public - in Bolivia and Paraguay.
Valverde said they have direct competitors in the region through Pedidos Ya, which also operates in Venezuela. In a recent article about trends in foodtech, Bloomberg Línea looked at trends that one investor called “the race to deliver the Cokes,” which is this trend of instant gratification that we’re seeing, especially in LatAm. Some say if the demand is there, we should meet it, while other investors say that the 15 minute delivery model isn’t sustainable, and only works when VC’s are subsiding these efforts. We’re here to see how it all pans out.
As for Yaigo, Valverde and his team will continue working at Yummy, and the brand will be known as Yaigo by Yummy. Valverde will lead the Bolivia and Paraguay operations.