Bain-Led, $350M Funding Round Signals Next-Gen Food Delivery Has Arrived

As consumers increasingly expect to get their needs met on demand, food delivery is evolving beyond the aggregator.

Wonder, for one, the mobile restaurant startup founded and helmed by Jet’s Marc Lore, has raised $350 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures, according to a LinkedIn post from Lore on Tuesday (June 14).

The company, which combines the food truck and delivery models, bringing the entire mobile kitchen to consumers’ homes, currently has 19 mobile restaurant chains and operates in 22 towns after, half a year after its launch.

“Six months ago, we introduced Wonder to the world — laying out our vision for the future of at-home dining and putting our first proverbial ‘steak; in the ground for how we’re going to get there,” Lore wrote in the post. “It’s pretty special what you can accomplish with a big, bold vision, the best people, and the capital to execute. … Wonder has a real opportunity to not only completely change how people eat, but also to create a better future with access to the world’s best food in a convenient, affordable, and sustainable way.”

Wonder is not the only food and beverage startup offering to bring the entire establishment to consumers’ doors. Take Robomart, a company that created a hail-able mobile snack shop and that later partnered with Unilever to create an ice cream truck that consumers can call to their door.

Read more: UK’s Unilever Rolls out Hail-Able Ice Cream Truck

“It gives consumers a way to get goods in the fastest possible way,” Robomart Co-founder and CEO Ali Ahmed told PYMNTS in a fall 2021 interview, noting that the model eliminates the friction of putting together an online basket. “Customers tend to spend over 20 minutes creating a basket, some cases can take up to an hour and a lot of customers get frustrated, and just stop … That’s where you see the most drop off — when customers are trying to put together a grocery basket.”

See also: Robomart Combats Basket Fatigue by Bringing the Convenience Store to Consumer’s Door

Across food categories, those in the space are looking for new ways of bringing products to consumers’ doors. Take, for instance, WoodSpoon, a New York-based company that has raised $16 million across its seed and Series A rounds to offer home chefs the opportunity to sell their foods on a delivery marketplace. The latter round was led by quick-service restaurant (QSR) giant Restaurant Brands International (RBI), parent company of Burger King and Popeyes, among others.

“[After] January 2021 … we were growing much faster than we expected,” WoodSpoon CEO and Co-founder Oren Saar told PYMNTS in an August 2021 interview following the company’s Series A funding announcement. “We grew about 50 percent month over month in every aspect — in customers, in home chefs, in revenue — and we started seeing really good traction in all of those aspect … So we raised this A round about eight to 10 months earlier than what we initially thought.”

Read more: RBI-Backed Home Chef Marketplace WoodSpoon Brings Personal Connections To On-Demand Delivery

Certainly, consumers increasingly expect to have food brought to their door, with more than half ordering from restaurant delivery aggregators at least once a month, according to data from the May edition of PYMNTS’ ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report.

For more: 19M More Consumers Went Online to Bank, Buy and Pay Bills in May 2022

The study, which drew from a survey of more than 2,600 U.S. consumers. The study found that the share of consumers using restaurant aggregators at least once a month rose 8% in May from 52% in April to 56% in May. Additionally, the survey’s findings revealed that the share of consumers using same-day grocery aggregators at least once a month rose 14% in May from 30% of all consumers in April to 34%.