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The salad days of fresh grocery delivery startups are over, but those that have stayed the course, and built businesses which are seeing gains, are still here and hungry for more growth. On Friday, one of those survivors, the Czech grocery delivery company Rohlik<\/a>, announced $170 million in new funding.<\/p>\n Rohlik \u2013 which means \u2018baker\u2019 in Czech (and also a little roll the baker might make) \u2013 has aimed to carve out a differentiated position. Its focus has been on operating smaller warehouses and linking up ties with local producers and sellers, such as butchers and fishmongers, rather than reproducing what a large supermarket might sell online (or indeed stock in a physical store). In reference to the Rohlik of its name, it bakes bread at its distribution centers.<\/p>\n \u201cTo replace Rohlik you would have to do five different shops,\u201d Tom\u00e1\u0161 \u010cupr, the CEO and founder of Rohlik, told TechCrunch in an interview. Some 17,000 SKUs are on offer via the service, with delivery slots of 1-2 hours from ordering.<\/p>\n Rohlik said it served 800,000 customers in 2023. Now, the plan is to use the fresh funding to expand its model in Europe \u2014 with a target of launching in 10 more cities in the next six years. <\/p>\n Alongside service expansion, it wants to turn up the gas on its tech, which includes logistics and analytics software; and robotics for sorting and picking \u2014 by licensing it to other delivery players to build out their own local networks and delivery operations modelled on what Rohlik has built. \u010cupr said it will launch its tech platform licensing initiative later this year.<\/p>\n The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is the lead investor in Rohlik\u2019s latest round, with previous backers Sofina, Index Ventures, Quadrille, and TCF Capital also participating, as well as the European Investment Bank (EIB) under its Scale-Up Initiative. The EIB portion is debt, per \u010cupr, who described it as a \u201cminority\u201d of the full amount.<\/p>\n \u010cupr declined to give a valuation for the round, but from what we understand it is higher than previous valuations but less than $2 billion. For some context, the last large round of funding that Rohlik raised was in 2022<\/a>, and that came in at what we now know to be around the $1.3B valuation mark pre-money. The total amount the startup has raised in equity and debt is now approaching $800M.<\/p>\n This latest funding injection is coming at a tough time in the grocery delivery business. The peak of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a couple of years of major attention, funding, and usage of delivery services \u2013 which led to hundreds of millions of dollars of funding being funneled into different permutations of the business model, especially those that looked particularly novel (such as \u201cinstant\u201d delivery startups). 2021 alone saw nearly $19B in investments<\/a> in grocery delivery startups according to the investment firm AgFunder.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perhaps inevitably, after the peak came the trough, with a number of delivery startups disappearing and\/or being acquired for pennies on the dollar\/pound\/euro, combined with lots of layoffs, retrenchments and restructuring. <\/p>\n After years of aggressive funding and growth, the erstwhile major player Getir<\/a> is now focusing on its home market of Turkey, for instance. While US rival GoPuff reportedly<\/a> burned through $400M last year. And it\u2019s not just the most obvious instant players that are buckling. Oda in Norway, a big grocery contender which also raised and acquired aggressively, has been laying off people in waves and shrinking its geographic footprint<\/a>.<\/p>\n