In late March Russian delivery service Broniboy received the first tranche of a 500 million ruble capital injection (some $6.25 million at the pre-war level). The funding is provided by Krasnodarzernoprodukt, a major supplier of farming commodities and services. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
While serving 17 Russian cities, Broniboy is the leader in the local delivery market of Krasnodar, a city of around 770,000 inhabitants in southern Russia. It claims more than 280,000 deliveries yearly — from food, to flowers, to medicines — as reported by Forbes Russia.
The company generated 363.2 million rubles in turnover in 2021 ($4.9 million at the average exchange rate of that year), four years after launch. Its losses amounted to 40.3 million rubles (nearly $550,000).
In May 2021, Broniboyraised 100 million rublesat a 3 billion ruble valuation ($40 million at that time). A previous round of funding brought in 130 million rubles.
“We take only as much as we can ‘digest’,” company co-founder Alexander Radionov said in a previous media interview.
The company had plans for further international expansion and a potential IPO in Russia and Western Europe in the next coming years. The turmoil brought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made these plans irrelevant: “These IPO prospects are totally unclear now,”said Broniboy CEO Ivan Trufanovin late March.
Meanwhile Bartello.ru, a food delivery service operating in Moscow and Yekaterinburg, attracted 72 million rubles ($900,000 at the pre-war level) from the corporate fund of mobile operator MTS. As reported by RB.RU, the fund received a 30.2% stake in the startup, which was created in 2018.
Bartello plans to use the funding to develop in such cities as Sochi, Kazan and Samara. MTS plans to connect the service to its MTS Live app.
