About
Wolt makes it incredibly easy for you to discover and get what you want. Delivered to you – quickly, reliably and affordably. And by doing so, we bring joy, simplicity and earnings to the neighborhoods of the world.
What is this Wolt thing anyway?
Wolt is a Helsinki-based technology company with a mission to bring joy, simplicity and earnings to the neighborhoods of the world. Wolt develops a local commerce platform that connects people looking to order food, groceries, and other goods with people interested in selling and delivering them. Wolt was founded in 2014 and joined forces with DoorDash (NASDAQ: DASH) in 2022. Together, we operate in more than 30 countries today, 28 of which are with the Wolt product and brand.
Together our aim is to build the best possible platform to serve merchants, consumers, and couriers in our existing and future markets. Our two companies share a strong vision for local commerce, and working side by side, we can accomplish more for all our stakeholders.
Companies usually have a “mission and vision”. What are ours?
Wolt is – essentially – building new infrastructure. We build a connection between restaurants and retailers that want to make and sell food and other products, couriers that want to earn through delivering those products, and customers who want to free up time and effort to focus on the more important things in life. By doing this, we make our cities also better places to live. And by “better” we mean happier people: happier small enterprises that have more business and that can employ more people, happier couriers that have a flexible way to earn when they choose, happier customers who now have easy access to a great meal or anything else they need, exactly when and where they need it - and who get to save some of their precious time while they are at it.
Our vision is to build the digital world version of the shopping malls we used to frequent, this time brought to the convenience of our homes and workplaces within the half-hour or so. We started with the food court on top the floor, and have since expanded to groceries on the ground floor along with all the other shops, stores and boutiques in the middle – and we’re still only getting started.
How about the journey so far, how has it been?
2014: Wolt was founded in Helsinki, Finland
Founding team of six with five focused on product development
Our first office was a 10-square-meter space in central Helsinki where we all worked together in one room for the first 9 months of our existence.
We decided the name of the company and filed all the paperwork. Wolt was the final name we were all able to agree on. One of our founders, Mika, was browsing through a list of imaginary punk band names and “Volt United” ultimately turned into Wolt. (Name contenders included amazing options like Blueberry Pie, Skyliner, Zaplane and Sergei).
This was also the year of the Sochi Olympics.
2015: Our first delivery in Helsinki!
14 employees by the end of September
We moved to a bigger office in Ruoholahti, just downstairs from the Supercell office. We even had the Apple chief of the App Store visit our office just after we’ve launched, as courtesy of Supercell. We were probably the smallest app maker they’d ever visited (and they didn’t disagree).
We raised a 2.5 million euro seed round of financing.
This was also the year Star Wars the Force Awakens had its premier.
2016: Expansion to Sweden and Estonia
60 employees by end of September
We opened an office in Stockholm, hurraa! We also expanded into our first cities outside of Helsinki – the cities of Turku and Tampere in Finland.
We raised 10 million euros in the so-called A-round of financing. The round was led by EQT Ventures.
This was also the year that Stranger Things premiered.
2017: Expansion to Denmark, Latvia and Lithuania
86 employees by end of September
We replaced third party tools with in-house created courier apps and our own logistics backend.
Adele won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
2018: Expansion to Croatia, Czech Republic, Norway, Hungary, Georgia, Israel and Poland
223 employees by end of September
We entered hypergrowth and went from 100 to 300 people (by end-of-year) at our offices
We raised a 27 million euro B-round of financing. The round was led by 83North.
The premiere of the Black Panther movie.
2019: Expansion to Serbia, Greece, Azerbaijan, Slovakia, Slovenia and Kazakhstan
569 employees by end of September
We partnered with South Pole to compensate for the CO2 emissions from Wolt deliveries (dating all the way back to the first delivery)
We raised 115 million euros in a so-called C-round, led by ICONIQ Capital and Highland Europe.
Also the year of the Game of Thrones final season.
2020: Expansion to Cyprus, Malta, Japan and Germany
1430 employees by end of September
We added grocery and retail into the Wolt app. We took action to keep ordering on Wolt as safe as possible, e.g. deliveries as no-contact.
We raised €100 Million from existing investors and Goldman Sachs Growth Equity and €7.5 Million from Delivery Hero’s co-founder Lukasz Gadowski
We became a unicorn, yey!
The year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
2021: Year of Retail and Wolt Market
3740 employees by end of September
We doubled down on retail and onboarded new partners, developed new tooling for the merchants, like Wolt Picker App, and accelerated our plans with our delivery-only stores, Wolt Market. We raised $530 million in financing. ICONIQ Growth led the round while Tiger Global, DST, KKR, Prosus, EQT Growth and Coatue joined as new investors. 83North, Highland Europe, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, EQT Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners from Wolt’s existing investors also participated in the round.
We entered a definitive agreement whereby DoorDash and Wolt were joining forces, resulting in the transaction that was closed in May 2022.
This was the year the Summer Olympics of 2020 took place in Tokyo, after being postponed due to the pandemic.
2022: Joining forces to serve customers across the globe
Wolt and US-based DoorDash joined forces with the closing of the transaction on May 31, 2022. Our CEO, Miki Kuusi leads all of DoorDash’s international business in the 30 countries outside of the US.
2023: Year of continued growth
Around 10,000 employees by end of year.
Hello Austria and Iceland! We expanded into two new countries, and now we operate in a total of 25 markets.
This was also the year Taylor Swift commenced on her Eras tour with a set list of 44 songs.
So, yet another food delivery company?
Actually not quite. Wolt got started on the far edge of the Scandinavian Peninsula, in the relatively small and spread out city of Helsinki. While Finland is a great country to live in, food delivery was an especially tough nut to crack in our Nordic home region:
Low density – Helsinki has a population of about 630 000 people, who are spread out across 213,8km2. That means there’s on average 2946 people on each square kilometer. (As a comparison, in Paris there’s about 20 370 people per square kilometer.) So we are a few and we are far apart. This means that we’ll never quite get the volume nor density that makes the food delivery problem much easier to solve with a high level of efficiency. Meanwhile, the smallest cities we operate in today have as few as 10 000 people living in our delivery area.
We don’t really have a strong takeaway culture nor is delivery a very everyday thing in our Northern home region. For context, most restaurants that offer delivery themselves as a service often trade in pizza or kebab. This was not a very fruitful ground to build a completely new delivery experience on top of.
Lowest income disparity in the world along with very high labour costs for any type of work. This combined with high price sensitivity means that our delivery fee and commission revenue are going to be relatively lower than virtually any other markets in the world compared to how much we need to be able to get to as courier earnings on an hourly basis (to cover not just the earnings but also all associated delivery cost, pensions and such).
All in all, these mean that our home market of the Nordics was one of the toughest places in the world to find a sustainable balance between our customers, restaurants and courier partners, as well as with ourselves as a company. Ultimately, this has meant that we’ve had to figure out ways how to get there differently from others:
Technology – real-time traveling salesman optimisation with as many moving pieces, hungry customers and busy restaurants as we have is a genuinely difficult mathematical problem to solve, not even talking about how to balance real-time delivery estimates, traffic situations, order volumes and human behaviour in a way that get the customer’s order delivery as quickly and precisely as possible, while actually making it worthwhile for all the counterparties in the equation. While this is something that we still constantly work on, our average delivery time remains at 30-35 minutes, and we’re always looking to do better.
Efficiency – our local country teams run the show in each of the markets we operate in, while we operate in relatively small countries and always with real-time customer support in local language. This means that we’ve had to become especially good in being able to productize and automate everything to the extent that it’s possible to have local teams in countries as small as one million people, and still get the numbers to work. This allows us to operate sustainably in cities as small as 10 000 people living in our delivery area.
Customer experience – ultimately we have no license to operate if we do not serve the customer in a brilliant, affordable way end-to-end: from app design and marketing to our real-time customer service, we do our best for you to be happy with us. And if something goes wrong, we genuinely want to fix it. That’s why we have local customer support in all the countries we’re in: real humans answering customers and partners in their own language in under 1 minute on average.
What operating sustainably and finding the right balance means for us?
We are committed to make the cities we operate in better places to live. We are also committed to do the right thing towards our teammates, partners, customers, and the general public. More concretely what that means:
Employees – We’re committed to being a great company to work for. We treat each other fairly, we promote equal opportunities and encourage diversity. We take pride in what people of Wolt do not just during their time with the company, but also the impact they will create in their future endeavours after Wolt.
Couriers – We’re committed to being a fair and sustainable platform. We treat our courier partners with respect. We always listen to feedback and regularly survey how our couriers are doing. We take pride in trying to increase earnings, introduce safety nets and remove hindrances as we continue growing and investing into making our products and technologies better.
Merchants – We’re committed to being a long-term partner. Through our service, we bring restaurants more orders, and we’re always helpful and responsive. We strive to find a long-term sustainable balance between our and the merchant's business in each of the cities we operate in.
Customers – We’re committed to being a great service and we will do our best to keep our customers happy. We’re available and respond to customers as quickly as possible. We own our mistakes, are committed to improving over time and pushing for the best real-time customer support in the world.
Society – We’re committed to being a climate-conscious company, and we will continue to take more action to fight climate change. We push for platform work that is a complementary and long-term sustainable model of work that makes our societies better and have higher opportunity because of what we do.
Investors - Wolt joined forces with DoorDash in 2022. Please see more about the company on DoorDash's investor relations website.
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Digital Services Act: Information on the active recipients of the Wolt service in the EU In line with Article 24 (2) of the Digital Services Act, Wolt provides the below information on the average monthly active recipients of its service in the EU. The number is updated as required to comply with the rules.
As of August, 2024, the Wolt number of monthly active recipients of the service that Wolt provides in the EU, as estimated by Wolt for the relevant scope, is under 15 million active recipients.
Disclaimers The data is estimated by Wolt internally and is subject to certain limitations and possible inaccuracies. For instance, it relies on analysis from multiple sources, and some users may be counted multiple times due to users' ability to deny us relevant analytics cookies.