Ukrainian TA Ventures and ICLUB invest in British delivery startup Jiffy

Venture fund TA Ventures and private investors club ICLUB invested in Jiffy Grocery, a 15-minutes groceries delivery service in the UK. The $28 million Series A funding round is led by family-owned investment company Heartland with participation from Boston-based VC firm Flint Capital, gaming firm Playrix, existing investors Baring Vostok Capital Partners, and LVL1, among others.

The Series A funds will be used for expansion in London and the UK in general. The company is also giving access to its tech platform to delivery players in international markets.

About Jiffy

Jiffy is a startup for 15-minute delivery of groceries, cooked food, medicine, alcohol, and tobacco from its network of dark stores.

Founded in April 2021, Jiffy currently has eight London stores and 20,000 customers. The startup was launched by serial entrepreneurs Vladimir Kholiaznikov and Artur Shamalov, who previously built other startups like KupiVIP, Foodza, MixCart, and DC Daily. Kholiaznikov was also CEO of big e-grocery player X5 Food Tech.

TA Ventures and ICLUB investment rationale

TA Ventures and ICLUB have invested in Jiffy for the first time in the previous £2.6 million seed round. Investors told AIN.UA that they were happy with Jiffy’s results and decided to participate also in Series A.

“Our portfolio company Impress founder Vladimir Lupenko introduced us to the Jiffy team earlier this year. He introduced us not for the purpose of investing but to give advice on strategy and fundraising since we had just closed a big round for Impress itself. We ended up chatting and immediately decided to invest. Similar models had not yet been launched on the market by then, and we knew that the best time to invest was now.

A month after our investment, several companies working with such a model appeared on the market, and the world’s most famous venture capital funds began to invest in them one after another. As it turned out in this market, the winner is not the one who started first (although Jiffy was one of the first), but the operationally efficient one. Jiffy is now one of the most efficient companies in the market by a number of key metrics, and as a result, it became of interest to Heartland, one of the largest investment funds (owner of Jack & Jones, Bestseller, Asos, a major shareholder in Zalando, Klarna, and other companies), which ended up leading the Series A,” says TA Ventures partner Oleg Malenkov.