Irish online grocery app Buymie has identified 200 large towns and cities in Ireland and Britain for expansion, its co-founder Devan Hughes has said. And the company will look at raising additional funding from investors to fund this growth, having secured €15.5 million to date from its backers.
On Inside Business, a podcast from The Irish Times, Mr Hughes said the pandemic was “transformational” for the company. “We became an essential service overnight,” adding that the business did a week’s work in volume on the day it was announced in 2020 that offices and schools would close here due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions.
Buymie expanded into Cork, Limerick, and Galway, and Bristol in England (its first international market) during the pandemic, with the company achieving profitability last year. “That was the biggest milestone that our board set out. Expansion is the name of the game for us. We’ve identified 200 cities and towns in Ireland and the UK where our service would be viable. We’ve seen Limerick and Galway perform incredibly well [since launch] and it’s given us huge confidence that the addressable market for our business and our platform is far larger than we had originally anticipated. We’re hopefully going to make some exciting announcements in the first half of this year.
Upside
“We have huge upside potential, particularly with our expansion in the UK. There is a €250 billion [grocery] market and we believe that our fair share is north of €1 billion a year in revenue . . . we have a long way to go.”
Launched in 2016, Buymie is a mobile app that allows consumers to order groceries from selected retailers and have them delivered to their door in as little as one hour. Lidl, Dunnes Stores and Tesco are among its retail partners.
Mr Hughes said customers pay a delivery charge of 5-13 per cent of the value of their basket of goods, depending on the retailer they use. The average basket of goods is valued at about €80, he added.
