Depop Founder Simon Beckerman’s DELLI Food Marketplace Raises $7.2M

Simon Beckerman, founder of peer-to-peer eCommerce platform Depop, popular for buying and selling used clothing, is looking to apply the same model to the food world — no, not secondhand foods, but a marketplace for independent sellers to connect with buyers.

Said marketplace, DELLI, announced on LinkedIn Tuesday (Sept. 6) that it has raised $7.2 million following the company’s roughly $2.9 million in seed funding announced in December.

This latest round was co-led by Balderton Capital and HV Capital, both onetime Depop investors, apparently once again getting behind Beckerman’s proven formula. Depop, for its part, followed a similar pattern, raising about $2 million in its seed round and $8 million in its Series A, only to be sold six years later to Etsy for $1.6 billion.

Read more: Etsy Raises Stakes in Apparel Resale Segment With $1.6B Acquisition of Depop

“I am really excited to announce DELLI’s $7.2 million raise to further ignite growth and expand its offer to makers and consumers alike,” Beckerman said in a statement. “DELLI’s success over the year, from the 200 makers already signed up to the app to units sold, highlights that there is space in the market for DELLI and a consumer desire for its service.”

DELLI’s marketplace allows chefs, home cooks and other food makers to sell their items for pickup or delivery, using a “drop” model wherein these sellers make a given product available in limited quantities at a given time. The marketplace is meant to cater to consumers’ new food habits, changed in the years since March 2020.

“The pandemic was unsurprisingly a huge boon to the cottage food industry,” Greta Anderson, principal at Balderton Capital, wrote in a Medium post on the subject Tuesday. “However, a return to normalcy has not seen these trends dissipate, fueled by hybrid work setups, rising costs leading many to seek extra income, and importantly — significant liberalization of the legislation regarding home chefs in the U.K. and the U.S. … DELLI is the first platform that offers these home sellers support to get their business up and running.”

Indeed, a significant share of consumers across financial lifestyles now buy food online, according to data from the August edition of PYMNTS’ monthly ConnectedEconomy™ study, “The ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report: Paycheck-to-Paycheck Consumers Digitally Disengage.” The report, which drew from a June survey of a census-balanced panel of 2,760 U.S. consumers, found that 46% of consumers who do not live paycheck to paycheck, 55% of those who do so comfortably, and 57% of those who do so with difficulty had engaged with restaurants online at least once in the previous 30 days.

See more: Inflation Causes Widespread Digital Pullback by Financially Strapped Consumers