Mexico’s SinDelantal.Mx, the online takeout delivery service started by the founders of Spain’s SinDelantal.com, has raised €2.5 million from Spanish VC Seaya Ventures.
Seaya’s Michael Kleindl was a previous backer of Spain’s SinDelantal, which exited to Just Eat late last year for a figure we pegged in the range of “a few million dollars,” so he knows its founders, Diego Ballesteros and Evaristo Babé, fairly well. But perhaps most notable is that Just Eat, despite having no stake in SinDelantal.Mx, has allowed the startup to re-use the SinDelantal name in its bid to give the other major players in the region, Rocket Internet’s Food Panda, and Delivery Hero/Team Europe’s Superantojo, a run for their take-out money.
And with Just Eat not having a presence in Mexico (though it does operate in Latin America via Brazil), might we be seeing history repeating itself? The Spanish version of SinDelantal pre-existed Just Eat’s operation in Spain, after all, and we know how that panned out.
In addition, the official announcement notes, “thanks to the technology developed for SinDelantal.com in Spain, the launch has been carried out in a quick and agile way.” Can we say, rinse and repeat?
To that end, some numbers. Launched in 2012, SinDelantal.Mx claims it’s already a leader in the Mexican online takeout delivery market. The startup says it works with 1,000 restaurants in Mexico City, receiving over 10,000 orders each month, a metric its achieved in half the time it took for the founding team to do in Spain.
The company is also talking up Mexico as a whole, noting that it has 47 million Internet users, pushing it into second place in Latin America in terms of online shoppers (Brazil holds the top spot). Meanwhile, it says that nearly 50 percent of online shoppers make purchases via mobile phones, and that e-commerce in the country is seeing a yearly growth rate of nearly 50 percent. Better still, the online delivery market in Mexico is said to be 10 times larger than in Spain, making the takeout space a tasty proposition.
These are sentiments echoed by Seaya’s Kleindl. “I am personally, and we at Seaya are, very bullish on Mexico in particular,” he tells TechCrunch by email, noting that it is a “huge market” with a population of 120 million and a “very healthy macro-economical climate,” which is growing.
“For SinDelantal it is an outstanding opportunity because the take-away and home-delivery culture is so strong; that’s why we estimate the market potential being 10 times that of Spain,” he says. “We know the founders very well. They did a fabulous job in the first one and will do it again now with more financial backing, more experience in a much larger market.”
