MUY, Now RobinFood, Plans Latam Expansion Following $16M Debt Financing

Latin American cloud restaurant MUY has changed its name to RobinFood and secured $16 million in debt funding that complements a $15 million Series B round  announced in October 2019.

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MGM Sustainable Energy Fund II provided the debt financing which gives RobinFood, founded in 2018, a total of $36 million in funding to date, José Guillermo Calderón, co-founder and CEO of RobinFood, told Crunchbase News. This includes investments from ALLVP, which led the Series B, and Seaya Ventures, which led RobinFood’s $4 million Series A.

Prior to starting Colombia-based RobinFood, Calderón was co-founder and CEO of Domicilios.com, an online food ordering service that he took public in 2017 and left shortly after. The company was later sold to iFood.

RobinFood is another go at challenging incumbent food delivery services, such as Rappi, another Colombian online delivery service. Rappi raised $300 million in a Series F round in September, bringing its total raised to $1.7 billion, according to Crunchbase data.

The average order size for Rappi in Latin America is $16, and the company makes money on every order, despite the size. A customer may only place 20 orders of food per month, Calderón said. In Europe, that might be 80 tickets per month due in part to the difference in minimum wage, he added.

“The only way to fix this is to increase income,” he said. “This made us want to build a player that would provide access to good affordable food in Latam.”

In addition, in Latin America, there are separate mobile phone apps for types of foods, and when people don’t have enough space on their phone for all of the apps, they delete them, Calderón added.

As a result, RobinFood made the decision to bring in its physical and virtual restaurants within one corporate brand to position itself to lead in the region. The debt financing is intended to be used to set up more restaurants and continue expanding in Mexico, as well as opening in Brazil and other cities in Colombia. Calderón’s goal is to have an ordering kiosk every 500 meters–roughly 1,640 feet–enabling customers to order from dozens of local and chain restaurants at one location and have the food delivered quickly.

Since the first quarter of 2019, RobinFood has grown 10 times in revenue and has increased its number of food offerings and average ticket size.

“We will be launching more brands each month and working toward establishing virtual food courts in commercial areas, while bringing more brands into the residential areas,” Calderón said.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias