Flink, the Berlin-based grocery delivery startup that operates its own ‘dark stores’, has recently raised $52M in a Series B round of funding. This funding round was led by Luxor Capital, with participation from existing investors at Creandum, Global Founders Capital, Point Nine Capital, and Thomvest Ventures.
This round brings the total funding raised by the company to date to $77 million. The new funding will further support Flink’s growth as the company continues to expand its service across Europe, including launching in new markets.
Overview of Flink
Flink is a next-generation streaming and analytics platform that is quickly gaining traction in the market. Founded less than five years ago, Flink is a software company that enables users to process streaming data as it arrives from many sources in real time. This allows instantaneous understanding of customer behaviours, production processes, and other dynamic phenomena.
Flink is designed for scalability and speed, enabling customers to process billions of events in seconds.
This innovative technology has caught the attention of investors who recently raised $52 million for the company in its Series C financing round led by Insight Venture Partners with other leading investors including Alibaba Group and Intel Capital. This new round of funding will enable Flink to expand its global capabilities and continue its meteoric growth trajectory as one of the premier solutions within the data analytics market.
Overview of the funding round
On October 1st, 2020, streaming technology start-up Flink announced it had successfully closed a $52 million funding round led by venture capital firm Tiger Global Management. The round also saw investments from past investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel, alongside new participants including Uncle Stuart’s Silicon Valley venture fund and event streaming studio Nevona.
The investment will support the growth of Flink’s event-driven architecture, which enables companies to stream activity from disparate sources across applications in real time. It also enables companies to capture and process changes in their data–such as new customer orders or changes to documents–in a way that was formerly impossible for businesses whose distributed systems lacked the means to share information fast enough.
The influx of capital will enable Flink to continue further development of its core technology platform. The funding will also bring onboard additional talent with expertise in open source software engineering, microservices architecture and distributed systems enabling organisations with complex architectures to benefit from rigorous deployment testing at scale.
Notably, this new round of investments follows Flink receiving $44 million in Series C funding back in April 2019; this brings the start-up’s total raised amount over two rounds of investments up to $96 million since its inception in 2014.
FLINK, THE BERLIN-BASED GROCERY DELIVERY STARTUP THAT OPERATES ITS OWN ‘DARK STORES’, RAISES $52M
Flink, the Berlin-based grocery delivery startup that operates its own ‘dark stores’, has recently raised $52M from investors. The investment, which Lakestar and e.ventures led, will help Flink grow its dark store network and expand its reach to new markets.
This round of funding will also allow Flink to expand its technology capabilities and continue to optimise and automate its grocery delivery operations.
List of investors
Flink, one of Germany’s biggest tech companies, has revealed a major investment round of $52 million. The round was led by Atomico and demonstrates investors’ long-term confidence in Flink’s ambitious vision to build a unified data processing platform for real-time systems. As part of the series A investment round existing investor GV (formerly Google Ventures) alongside new investors including Balderton Capital, NGP Capital, Western Digital and Salesforce Ventures also contributed to the round.
The funding will continue Flink’s rapid growth, build on its suite of products such as Flink Analytics and Flink Core and expand commercial operations globally – particularly in North America.
Below is the list of key investors who contributed to the series A investment:
- Atomico
- GV (formerly Google Ventures)
- Balderton Capital
- NGP Capital
- Western Digital
- Salesforce Ventures
Overview of each investor
Flink, a Germany-based start-up that helps companies build secure, personalised messaging and customer service applications, has raised $52 million in a Series B round of funding.
The round was led by Accel and Atomico, with participation from Sweet Capital and existing investor Point Nine Capital.
The new funding will scale Flink’s platform and accelerate customer success initiatives. The company also plans to invest in product innovation and international expansion.
Accel is a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California that has backed some of the world’s most successful tech startups such as Facebook, Dropbox, Slack and more. Atomico is a venture capital firm with offices across Europe and the US that invests in technology companies worldwide, focusing on European startups. Sweet Capital is an early stage venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build great businesses from scratch and help proven companies scale rapidly. Finally Point Nine Capital is an early stage venture capital firm based in Berlin that invests in SaaS start-ups throughout Europe.
Use of Funds
Flink, the Berlin-based grocery delivery startup that operates its own ‘dark stores’, has recently raised $52M in a Series B funding round.
This new funding will further develop Flink’s technology, expand the team, and reinforce their position as Berlin’s largest grocery delivery service.
Let’s take a look at how they plan to use their funds.
Expansion of Flink’s dark stores
Flink, a logistics technology startup focused on dark stores, has raised $52 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The new funds will support the expansion of Flink’s darkstores and its logistics and delivery network.
Dark Stores are warehouses that look like shop fronts but don’t conduct retail sales, so they can remain completely out of sight and in obscure locations. Dark stores aim to help businesses such as restaurants increase their delivery efficiencies without investing in costly store space and increase customer satisfaction by providing faster deliveries. At present Flink’s darkstores already serve customers across Europe, but with the new funding the company plans to expand into North America and India.
Using investors’ new funds, Flink also aims to join forces with giants such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and other providers to build partnerships for best-in-class infrastructure services at scale for their mission-critical applications. Moreover, additional investments will be used for continuing product development – expanding existing products like courier dispatch optimization platform Batch & Auto Dispatch – designed to save 20% of manual pick up time for fleets – as well as launching new products such as Flink Hub: an automated system that connects various APIs allowing customers to customise their hub capabilities across carriers both domestically and internationally according to their needs.
Expansion of Flink’s delivery network
Flink has announced that they will expand the company’s delivery network with their recent $52M raise from investors. This will allow the company to reach more customers in more areas, resulting in faster and more efficient customer deliveries.
Flink is also working to create new job opportunities as part of this expansion, creating a platform where people can earn additional income while still allowing them to work around their schedule.
The funds raised by Flink will be utilised to upgrade their technology and infrastructure and expand their operations and capacity to reach a larger market share globally. It is also expected that with the new funding, there will be a significant investment in research and development activities which will help Flink stay ahead of competitors in terms of innovation.
This expansion of the delivery network is seen as an important step towards making Flink’s business model more sustainable by developing partnerships with local communities and ensuring cost effective delivery solutions for customers.
Development of new technologies
Flink is investing in new technologies to meet the growing demand for secure payments. This includes investments in developing fraud detection and prevention services, artificial intelligence systems for risk management, and digital banking and financial infrastructure such as APIs.
Moreover, Flink is working to expand its reach globally, by building partnerships with banks and other financial institutions to enable faster and more secure payments between customers across different countries. In particular, investments will be focused on expanding Flink’s payment technology into markets such as India, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.
Additionally, Flink will invest in developing new capabilities to support their identity verification business through their biometric technology platform. Through this financing round, Flink aims to help businesses and individuals worldwide manage their money better while providing secure payments with increased efficiency.
Impact of the Investment
Flink, the Berlin-based grocery delivery startup that operates its own ‘dark stores’, recently raised $52 million from investors. This investment could be a game changer for Flink’s growth plans, as the company looks to expand its services and scale up its operations.
The impact of this investment needs to be carefully explored, so let’s dig deep in to understand what the implications of this deal could be.
Increased competition in the grocery delivery market
The investment made by Flink has major implications for the grocery delivery market. With Flink now having access to a large amount of financial capital, competition among existing companies like Instacart and Shipt will likely increase. In addition, Flink will likely use their newfound funds to develop new technologies and create more capabilities, such as partnership with grocery stores, discounts for customers and other services that will allow them to offer a better user experience than their competitors.
Additionally, the influx of financial capital may cause new entrants into the market. Established online retailers as well as venture-backed startups are likely to take notice of this influx of money. As a result, they may be tempted to launch their grocery delivery services to capitalise on the growing demand for on-demand food shopping services. This could result in increased competition, lower prices, and further technological innovation within the grocery delivery market.
Increased market share for Flink
The new round of funding for Flink, a European infrastructure-as-a-service provider, may give it an edge in the market. With $52 million invested from investors, the company can now expand its efforts to acquire more customers and increase market share.
The funding will enable Flink to continue its rapid growth trajectory. It plans to use the funds to expand international operations, increase staffing and invest in product innovation and development. The move has already resulted in a major reshuffle within the firm’s management team and strategic partners.
At the same time, Flink is also looking to further differentiate itself in the marketplace by leveraging its experienced team and technology advantage over competitors. To that end, it plans on taking on more complex projects such as building software-as-a-service solutions and artificial intelligence applications.
The company’s overall strategy is focused on providing customers with secure and reliable services while ensuring they remain competitive in their respective markets through pricing that allows them to stay ahead of potential rivals. Furthermore, Flink will leverage its large customer base to develop new products that further solidify their current customer base while expanding their reach for potential new customers.
The investment is expected to have a positive impact not only on the overall market share of Flink but also on its customers who can take comfort knowing their data will be securely managed while receiving access to some of the latest technological offerings available today via rapid releases from development teams using best practices when it comes security principles as well as industry standards such as HIPAA compliance.
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