Buymie CEO Devan Hughes. Image: Conor McCabe Photography
The same-day grocery delivery start-up is expanding out west after seeing surging demand in Dublin and Cork over the last year.
Same-day grocery delivery start-up Buymie is rolling out services in Galway and Limerick.
Launching next Monday (31 May), the Irish start-up said its grocery delivery and personal shopping services will reach more than 190,000 people in the two counties.
It has partnered with Dunnes Stores, Lidl and Tesco and is hiring 60 personal shoppers for Galway and Limerick to carry out same-day deliveries for customers. In some cases, Buymie delivers within one hour.
The service has been operating in Dublin and Cork as well as Bristol, its first UK city, where demand for online grocery delivery accelerated over the past 18 months due to lockdown measures.
“We have seen incredible demand for the Buymie same-day grocery delivery in Ireland and the UK and today’s announcement brings the service to thousands more Irish households,” chief executive Devan Hughes said.
“As we see the light at the end of the tunnel, we are all going to be making up for lost time and using a service like Buymie can give customers the option of taking back those two hours spent in the car, aisles and queues.”
Buymie raised a Series A round last June of €5.8m to meet growing demand for delivery services, bringing its total funding to €10.5m.
According to the company, its service has been used by one in 10 households in Dublin since launching in 2016.
In May of last year, Buymie entered the UK market in Bristol through a partnership with UK’s Co-op to serve around 250,000 households in the region.
Grocery delivery has skyrocketed in the last year in Europe with several new start-ups popping up, many promising rapid deliveries in 15 to 20 minutes through networks of dark store warehouses in cities that house goods.
Investors have taken notice, pumping money into what they hope will be the next big thing. Gorillas, a Berlin-based grocery delivery start-up, raised $290m in March, vaulting it to a billion-dollar valuation less than a year after founding.
Several start-ups including Weezy, Dija, Zapp have all launched in the UK over the last year with the latter raising $100m in Series A funding in March.
