Growth

UK-based, fast growing and profitable online grocery delivery platform.

GreenBank Capital has reached agreement to acquire a significant shareholding in, and provide merchant banking services to, Beelivery the UK-based, fast-growing and profitable online grocery delivery platform. Unlike virtually all its competitors in the on-line grocery delivery sector, Beelivery’s highly advanced and proprietary online ordering and logistics algorithms, combined with its low-cost model, have enabled Beelivery to achieve profitability already, whilst the big names in the industry, including the likes of Ocado, continue to struggle to make their businesses profitable. Beelivery, which specialises in quick delivery, provides two delivery options – “now” which offers delivery within 60 minutes (achieving an average of 46 minutes across the whole of the UK) and “today” which offers delivery slots with the following 24-hour period. Orders can be placed by customers, and deliveries are carried out by a team of independent drivers, 24/7, 365 days a year.

Beelivery, which sources its line of products from any grocery outlet local to the customer, currently has over 20,000 delivery drivers serving UK customers. Unlike most of its competitors Beelivery has more than 90% nationwide coverage and average delivery times of only 46 minutes.

Beelivery was founded in 2015 and currently has over 90,000 customers. Just under £8m (C$14m) of orders were handled in the last financial year to September 2020 generating a profit at an EBITDA level. Having demonstrated the robustness of its business model Beelivery is now raising money to rapidly scale the business and to expand both in the UK and overseas, with management targeting orders of over £370m (C$645m) in the year to end September 2023.

GreenBank has invested £2.5m (C$4.36m) for an initial 5.883% of Beelivery, subject to Beelivery satisfying certain conditions. GreenBank has also been granted a two-year option to acquire a further 20% of Beelivery for £40m (C$70m).

Beelivery has also agreed to appoint GreenBank as its merchant bank with a view to listing on the Canadian Securities Exchange or other international exchange as soon as possible, and to act as adviser on any future fund raisings. GreenBank will also appoint one director to the Board of Beelivery.

Transparency for people donating money

Greenbank Capital purchased a 25% shareholding in Flex Capital, a company that has developed a donating app, designed to radically improve transaction transparency for people donating money across a variety of industries and encourage communities of donors to communicate together and develop, from football clubs to charities and everything in between.

The charity sector, for example, receives many tens of billions of dollars of donations per annum worldwide, but the level of transparency in how the money is spent is minimal, and the related gratification a donor receives – as a result of not knowing how the money they donated has tangibly helped – is therefore correspondingly small.

In contrast, if a donor knows that the money they have donated is helping a specific good cause and can actually see the manner in which their specific contribution is deployed, the level of donor gratification – and therefore willingness to help more – radically increases. The Eflex app not only provides that level of transparency, but also encourages communities of donors to develop as like-minded people see their collective donations at work, which in turn can help promote the good cause by encouraging others to join.

Eflex will generate revenue by charging a transaction fee from each transaction processed through the app and by providing service support where needed. Total transactions are expected by Eflex to eventually exceed C$1bn per annum.