Cartwheel: Disrupting the Delivery Industry
Chingona Ventures is very excited to welcome Cartwheel to our family of portfolio companies! Cartwheel is an on-demand delivery management platform for restaurants and couriers, with over 10 years of experience in the industry. With Moonshots Capital leading the round, along with other investors such as TenOneTen Ventures, ActOne, and Pitbull Capital — Chingona Ventures is proud to have participated in the successful closing of Cartwheel’s $3 million round in seed funding. We would like to congratulate Alex Vasilkin, Denis Zamilyn, and Magdim Metshin. The round will be used to further product development, partner integrations, and company expansion.
Cartwheel provides a state-of-the-art delivery management software, built for on-demand optimization. The company’s technology supports in-house, outsourced, and hybrid delivery models, empowering operators to maintain control over the customer experience while balancing costs and resources to make every delivery profitable.
The company was founded in 2012 as a delivery restaurant. After it quickly grew to become one of the most popular delivery operations in Los Angeles, the founders decided to focus solely on the delivery outsourcing business. When the team realized there was no software solution to meet all their needs, they decided to build it themselves.
“The Cartwheel team has spent the last ten years building and optimizing delivery management technology, evolving a solution built for our own restaurant into a SaaS product designed for scale, and we are proud to count some of the biggest brands in the industry as our partners and customers,” says Alex Vasiklin, Cartwheel co-founder and CEO.
At Chingona, we are excited about adding Cartwheel to our investment portfolio because of their great turnkey technology and promising hybrid delivery model, which we have seen more and more restaurants gravitate towards. Such a model allows businesses to maintain an in-house program alongside their third-party partners, enabling them to self-select some orders for self-delivery and redirect the rest to third-party services. During peak periods when an in-house fleet is occupied, Cartwheel automatically taps into outsourced driver fleets, and allows businesses to set automatic rules for order routing.
We appreciate Cartwheel’s founder-market fit since the team previously ran a restaurant and a courier service business (Gourmet Runner). Also, we are bullish on the growth of the food delivery market, which has continued to skyrocket even after the pandemic and is projected to hit ~$30B in 2022. Finally, we highlight Cartwheel’s strong partnerships with platforms, such as ChowNow, Nash, and Olo, which will position them to expand even further. To date, Cartwheel has been a powerful tool for top brands including Portillo’s, P.F. Chang’s, Charleys Philly Steaks, Taco del Mar, and more.
We are thrilled to see this seed round come to fruition and look forward to continuing to see Cartwheel’s growth to the next level. Congratulations again to the entire team for their vision, hard work and dedication!
