Coming in hot: really great delivery food, that is. We are excited to launch Huuva, the platform powering virtual restaurants. Through Huuva, we aim to both help the restaurants make food delivery a sustainable business and bring better delivery food options for all the foodies out there.
Today, we are opening the doors of our first-ever virtual food court in Tapiola. At the same time, we are also happy to announce our €1,050M pre-seed funding round, led by Lifeline Ventures and joined by several angel investors. With the help of this backing, we are setting our sights already on the wider Helsinki area and, later in the fall, Central Europe.
On one of the hot days during the summer of 2020, I started to think about setting up my own pizza place with a friend of mine as a side hustle. I’ve always been the cook of our friend group, either whipping up sourdough pizza for a weekend brunch or rolling out spring rolls for parties.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that setting up a brick-and-mortar restaurant is a lot harder than it may seem at first sight. Entering the restaurant market is extremely capital intensive: setting up a kitchen takes a lot of dough (pun intended). All this combined with very long minimum lease maturities and no guarantees of success, the idea shortly ended up in the dusty back of my Notes.
Unbeknownst to me, the other Ville had been following the food delivery market closely during the past few years, having the exact same thoughts: Food delivery is booming, but there is something inherently broken with the system. The system doesn’t always create profitable returns for brick-and-mortar restaurants. The restaurateurs constantly come up with new creative concepts, but expanding restaurants in new areas and succeeding takes more than finding suitable real estate – it takes time, money, and a vast amount of effort.
We also felt that the customer experience was lacking. We all know what it feels like to receive a cold pizza – and don’t even get me started with the hardship of picking a place that the whole group wants to order from.
This is why Huuva is here. We want to change how great delivery food is being made and become the number one platform for scaling virtual restaurants. In short, we want to make food delivery a good deal for both restaurants and the food lovers out there.
We have built a commission-based virtual food court for restaurants. Our kitchens are designed for delivery, all the way from software that enters delivery orders for cooks to the way the kitchens are located around the cities. The kitchens are ready-to-use for restaurants in days, not months, so a restaurant can easily open new spots around different cities – and in the future, in new countries as well.
Huuva’s kitchen spaces are located close to areas of significant delivery demand, meaning that restaurants can reach a broad new pool of hungry customers – and the local food lovers get a wider selection of restaurants. These locations are also easily accessible for couriers, meaning no more walking inside shopping malls or waiting around restaurants.
We’ve opened our first kitchen in Tapiola, where Pupu, Story and Bites Burgers will bring their menus and their kitchen know-how. Shoot your first order from here.
It goes without saying that our team has big plans for Huuva.
During fall 2021, we will be launching four virtual food courts in the Helsinki region – the restaurants featured will be a bunch of fan favorites. Following this, we are taking steps outside of Finland as well – you’ll be hearing about this soon enough.
We are also constantly developing our technical product – OS enabling multiple restaurants to operate as one in every Huuva kitchen – with our brilliant team of engineers.
Talking about our stellar team, we are currently on the lookout for new talent to join our ranks. If you are passionate about food, enjoy the speed of a startup and appreciate an ambitious team trying to revolutionize how restaurants work for good, drop us a message at hello@huuva.io and tell us who you are.
