In the U.S., when we’re hungry and feeling lazy and don’t want to cook, we’ve got GrubHub and Seamless to order food from online and on mobile apps, and to have that food delivered to us. In Brazil, they have iFood. The online food delivery service, which also has mobile apps for Android and iPhone, just raised $2.6 million from Latin American mobile content company Movile.
The strategic funding from Movile is aimed at helping to get users more aware of the iFood service. Movile is a provider of mostly mobile content, partnering over the years with carriers to distribute video and other content to feature phone users in Latin America. But now that smartphones are becoming all the rage, it’s looking for ways to cash in on its mobile expertise. For example, by making investments in startups like iFood, which are increasingly using mobile technologies as part of their businesses.
iFood wasn’t always mobile. In fact, it didn’t have any mobile apps at all until just about six months ago. But since launching apps for iPhone and Android, the number of orders it’s taken on those platforms has grown rapidly. In just six months, mobile orders have gone from zero to 20 percent of its overall business. And that growth is expected to continue.
All in all, iFood is delivering more than 50,000 orders a month, from more than 1,000 different restaurants throughout Brazil. And the startup’s revenues are increasing at a rate of about 10 percent per month, with no slowdown in sight. It expects to be used by more than 5,000 restaurants and food chains by 2014. That’s a $4 billion opportunity in Brazil alone.
While iFood is currently focused on its home market of Brazil, there’s of course a huge opportunity to expand into other Latin American markets, and eventually maybe even the U.S. It’ll be helped in that pursuit by Movile, which could help it get distribution in new mobile markets.
Movile is a leading mobile internet services company in Latin America. Its portfolio includes mCommerce and Mobile Payments, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Marketing and Messaging, and Mobile Utilities. The company operates 10 offices: three in Brazil (Campinas which serves as headquarters and technology base, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, which serves as a commercial center), one in Mexico (Mexico City), one in Argentina (Buenos Aires), two in Colombia (Bogota and Medelin), one in Venezuela (Caracas), and one in USA (Silicon...
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