LATAM instant grocery delivery startup Calii announces Series A round

Latin America-based grocery delivery startup Calii has bagged $22.5 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Dalus Capital and JAM Fund, with participation from backers including Forerunner Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, Y Combinator and Base10 Partners.

To date, the venture, which was founded in 2019, has raised nearly $35 million.

According to its LinkedIn profile, Calii is “the number one rated grocery delivery service in Latin America: ultra fresh produce and thousands of additional SKUs delivered instantly at below retail prices.”

It connects directly to local producers - thus bypassing middlemen - and “automates away all inefficiencies in the supply chain, fulfilling via a network of dark stores and aggregating demand via social, gamified deals.”

Aldi UK

In the UK, meanwhile, Aldi UK has ended its relationship with Deliveroo and pulled 130 stores nationwide from the food delivery platform.

The two first partnered in May 2020.

Aldi said it would offer a rapid delivery service from a store in Nottingham, before extending the trial to seven more locations across the East Midlands in June 2020.

Giles Hurley, CEO at Aldi UK & Ireland, said: “This is a new and exciting venture for us and we will be constantly reviewing how we can best serve our customers and continue to provide them with the high quality products they are used to in store.”

By the end of 2020, the partnership had been expanded to 130 stores.

Richard Thornton, Communications Director at Aldi UK, commented: “We’re finding customers really value having more ways to shop at Aldi, particularly at the moment.”

“That’s why we’ve been keen to extend our trial with Deliveroo to stores in more new areas, and plan to launch our trial of Click and Collect in more than 200 additional stores between now and Christmas. We will continue to monitor feedback of the service closely.”

Fast forward to the present day and the great rapid delivery experiment is no more.

“We have decided to end our trial with Deliveroo to focus on our Click and Collect service, which remains on offer at more than 200 of our stores nationwide,” an Aldi spokesperson told RTIH.

A case of shopping patterns returning to normal in a post-Covid world? Answers on a postcard, please, to the usual address.

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