Led by Playfair Capital, investors include, Seedcamp, The London Co-Investment Fund, Ballpark Ventures, Patrick de Laive, Floris Rost van Tonningen and other strategic investors from some of the world’s largest food delivery businesses. It is currently headquartered out of MassChallenge UK in London as part of their accelerator programme, and was created in Trento, Italy, at the TechPeaks accelerator.
Pronto delivers a curated selection of restaurant quality dishes straight from their chefs to your desk or door in an average of 20 minutes. Customers order with a mere three taps in the easiest ordering experience on the market. Customers have their fresh food delivered by friendly, bow-tie-wearing drivers carrying stylish, 100 per cent recyclable packaging.
Founded by an engineering-trained team who grew up in the food industry, co-founder and CEO, James Roy Poulter said, ‘Pronto is building the food infrastructure of the future in a trillion-pound global food market. With technology and food at our core, we are working at a more fundamental level – so that we can get healthier, higher quality ingredients into the meals that we all consume day to day. With intelligent menu design, we are able to move up the supply chain faster, sourcing more intelligently and reducing waste to bring food from the farm to forks faster and therefore fresher.’
Started in June 2014 by Poulter, Simone D’Amico and Lukáš Doležal, traction has been strong in the London market. With average customers ordering more than 5 times a month, and some customers ordering daily, Pronto replacing kitchens as Uber is replacing cars is already becoming a reality for some customers.
The founders spent the first 6 months in London sleeping in the warehouse used as the initial production kitchen and office. First sleeping on the hard floor, then a thrown-away mattress, James, who has delivered over 300 orders personally, said, ‘We have been so deeply involved in the problem – quite literally living in it – that no one has been able to build such relevant technology so fast, to solve the real problems of bringing incredible food to our customers.’
Joseph Charlesworth, partner at lead investor Playfair Capital who also sits on the Pronto board said, “Pronto is a full stack food delivery business. The amount of technology they have built under the hood is impressive and controls everything from food procurement to processing and delivery. It’s the only way to offer consistent and excellent quality across the entire production and service chain whilst enabling transparency to customers on food ingredients – something which is becoming increasingly important to more health-conscious Londoners who want to know exactly what they’re eating and where it came from.”
Martin Sharman, Director of Operations at MassChallenge UK, added, ‘Pronto is not just food delivery – they have thought about the entire system completely differently. What the customer sees is healthy, fresh, and delicious food with top quality customer service, but behind the scenes it is a food revolution. Pronto is on the brink of explosive growth in London and is about to disrupt this mammoth industry.’
