Jinn, the U.K. same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery app, has pulled out of all markets outside London, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, the startup shut down operations in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds as of yesterday, whilst I understand the Spanish team may have been let go, too phone covers.
In an emailed statement, Jinn founder Mario Navarro confirmed that the company has pulled out of other markets outside London. “As we continue our path towards profitability, we have decided to focus our operations in London, where we currently receive over 90% of our orders. With the objective of being profitable before the end of the year, we have temporarily paused our activity in other markets”.
The “pausing” of operations — startup speak for withdrawing from a market — offers an interesting counterpoint to what Navarro told TechCrunch in May when the company raised $10 million in further funding, capital it planned to use to continue to grow and “consolidate its presence in its main markets”. As of today, those main markets have shrunk considerably .
It is also not clear if Jinn’s latest round was based on tranches or contingent on certain milestones or KPIs being met. I also understand efforts are underway to refocus Jinn’s strategy towards B2B on-demand delivery, rather than a purely B2C push, which Navarro also confirmed.
“We will also start offering an integrated B2B solution for our business partners,” he tells TechCrunch. “We expect this to be an area of strong growth for our business, as an increasing number of retailers are looking to improve their delivery solution, to compete against large e-commerce websites.”
That, of course, puts Jinn much more up against rival Quiqup, for example, which recently became the partner powering U.K. supermarket chain Tesco’s on same-hour delivery service, amongst a number of prominent B2B partnerships.
“[Quiqup] is killing it on that side of things, hard to compete now with their latest round of funding of $20m,” is how one source put it to me. “They were the quiet kids in the corner not disclosing amounts and partnerships early. Everyone within the industry just disregarded them completely. Was a big shock and surprise when they raised that big round Wigs for Cancer Patients Bright Hopes. They perfected the model and made sure the unit economics worked and then thought about scale”.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/jinn-london/
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