How London startup Quiqup successfully pivoted from selling to restaurants to landing some of the largest retailers in the world
Guest post brought to you by the team at Think Enterprise

Quiqup was founded in London in 2014 by 5 founders — Tim Linssen, Danny Hawkins, Federico Ferraro, Bassel El Koussa & Rami Idriss. The company started off as a consumer iOS app which allowed users to order “anything” and have it delivered to them by a “Quiqee” (a man or woman on a scooter) in under an hour.
The product resonated with London’s elite, allowing them to outsource their supermarket shopping in Harrod’s food hall or to pick up food from some of London’s finest dining establishments, all at a click of a button. As the business built up more traction with their customer base growing, it allowed Quiqup to aggressively expand their fleet of Quiqees. An expanding fleet meant that they could service more customers at a quicker speed to be truly on demand.
This resulted in the company closing its first seed round of investment with various strategic investors, including Delivery Hero (owners of Hungry House). Then came partnerships. As the customer base of Quiqup grew, the company started formalising commercial arrangements (B2B2C) with their customer’s favourite restaurants and retailers making the order process more seamless and more cost effective.

The result led to quicker and cheaper delivery for the customers and more revenue for Quiqup and the retailers. In turn spurring further growth as the product became more affordable and attainable for a wider range of Londoners.
Doing this made it clear to the founders and the retailers that on demand delivery was something that needed to be taken seriously. This became ever more present when retailers looked over their shoulders to see Amazon Prime starting to deliver same day from their out of city warehouses, a potential catastrophe for the high street.

The business then pivoted. With their extensive fleet, Quiqup was able to build out a new tech solution where instead of the retailers servicing Quiqup’s customers, Quiqup was able to provide a 3rd party delivery solution to the retailer’s own customers allowing them to offer on-demand delivery of their products.
This proved so successful that Quiqup was able to land contracts with major businesses including Tesco, Wholefoods and Burger King, which all now offer on demand 1 hour delivery to their own customers, utilising Quiqup’s fleet of drivers as well as their API and Quiqdash technology. Quiqup has since closed their series B, and are expanding in both nationally and internationally.
Founder Bassel El Koussa said back in May 2017 that the B2B side of the business now makes up around 45 percent. This was an increase of around 40% since January 2017.


