Barcelona-based delivery app Glovo has been making significant strides in the market over the years, establishing a presence in countries like Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria. One of its largest markets, however, is Ukraine. 

The company currently operates in 37 Ukrainian cities, with a team of 250 people, thousands of active daily customers, couriers, and over 10,000 local shops and restaurants selling through its app. As Glovo’s co-founder Sacha Michaud points out, the company now also has a responsibility to contribute to the growth of the local economy and foster innovation in the country by supporting Ukrainian entrepreneurs.

In an interview with IT Logs in Kyiv, Michaud discusses the company’s ongoing relief efforts in Ukraine, the future of delivery, and the potential for expanding into Macedonia and the rest of the Balkans.

IT Logs: How is Glovo currently operating in Ukraine and what are the challenges that it faces?

Sacha Michaud: We were growing very well before the war, it was a very solid business, a top three market. We closed down the business when the war started and we reopened very quickly. Today, we are back to Ukraine being the third largest business in the company. It’s growing very well here and here and it’s profitable. The main challenges are how we operate in cities and how we have to look up to safety first. So if this may be a safety risk in a city we have to switch operations, we’re generally operating at much lower hours than in other countries.

So, for example, in many countries we are open 24/7, but in Ukraine they have a curfew. You have to close the business down earlier. So often we’re operating maybe 40-50% less hours if you could have outages, electricity cuts. It’s a complex issue that affects our business now. A partner having a blackout – they can’t take any orders, the machines are not working, there are curfews, safety risks if there’s an imminent airstrike. All these things are factored in, so basically, the business would be much much bigger if it were not for war.

Can you take us back nine years ago, when Glovo started, who had the idea. who did the tech, and so on?

I met Oscar (Glovo’s co-founder Pierre) at the end of 2014. And he just came back from the US where he was studying at Georgia Tech University. And I was thinking of building an idea similar to Glovo, my inspiration came from Uber and what they were doing with ride hailing, disrupting a traditional industry like taxi driving. I thought it’d be great to build a company that instead of moving people around the city, you move things, through on demand, so immediately through an app, get people to deliver them. They will also have another app and Uber was my reference. 

Oscar came back from us with the same idea. In fact, he was already doing a seed round and already run some tests at home in a web app. And people introduced me to him and I said yes, I’d invest in global and also I think you’d do something similar. I asked him if he wants to do this together, and he agreed.

It took Glovo five years to have a unicorn status. What did you learn from this whole process? 

It’s definitely not easy. We’ve had so many moments where we nearly run out of money. One fundraising round happened three or four months too late, we had to put money into the company to make sure that we can pay salaries out of our own pocket. We’ve had fundraising rounds, we’ve had 100 NOs and finally somebody saying yes. So it’s certainly not easy, our biggest difficulty was always fundraising, always convincing, serious big VCs, especially to invest in a small Barcelona startup that was going to impede on the world scene. 

Then, I think a lot of competition, very tough, competitive market. All of our competitors have more capital than us. They would come in and spend a lot of money, that’s just our main competitors like delivery platforms like UberEATS and so on. But actually, there’s another phase of, if you remember when COVID, the fast groceries, they also then came in afterwards with a lot of money, spending a lot of money so we’ve had to weather a lot of strong competition, but also crazy competition since they’re not worried about making money, just getting market share and throwing money at the market. And that was always tough as well. 

As the company grew, what was the role of CEE as your market?

The way we grew, we grew first in southern Europe. Where we are today in their three key markets, Spain, Italy and Portugal. We then launched in Latin America. We launched 11 cities there. Then we launched in Central Eastern Europe, Poland, the Balkan region, then Central Asia, and finally Africa. 

We sold the business in Latin America, we had a good opportunity to sell the business, which gave us a very good return on investment. The rationale for selling Latam was that we had so much competition there, it was really difficult to maintain market share, competitors investing a lot. We thought it made a lot more sense for the business to sell Latin America, get that capital and invest in Central Eastern Europe. We expanded and we also acquired a number of companies in the Balkan region, we bought some local players to consolidate leadership, and now we’re leaders in the region.

In terms of new tech trends, what do you think it’s next for delivery? And basically, how does Glovo fit with these new trends?

I think Glovo fits perfectly with the changing dynamics of how consumers buy goods. We’re a facilitator, we’re a tool for retailers – people in the high streets, shops in the streets of your city, restaurants to sell online. That through delivery, it can be through pickup. I think more and more people will now start using apps like Glovo, maybe not for delivery, but maybe to order something and just pick it up. We’re helping them sell online, and we will give you as many tools as possible to make that happen.

My vision on retail sales in the future, and this includes large supermarkets including local SMEs, is that I think there’s gonna be two ways of buying. I think there’s going to be necessity, and convenience. So these are things you want to buy that are not fun, such as toilet paper for example, or 12 bottles of water, washing powder and so on. So I think there will be convenience in necessity. And I think people will use digital channels to do this and not waste their time. We’ll have companies who are going to sell it to you and get it delivered to you at more or less the same price as you buying it.

Then, there is what I call entertainment, or where it’s fun to buy. And there’s a lot of examples of that – my wife would say to me, “hey let’s go shopping”. I don’t need another shirt, I don’t need more socks, my wife doesn’t need any more shoes – but you go and basically it’s entertainment. 

And I think this is the case with food as well. I love cooking and sometimes part of my cooking experience is to go to the shop. Choose the ingredients, smell it, buy it, take it home and cook – for me that’s entertainment. And I think shops will give that extra experience. The restaurant business is very similar – and, when we launched Glovo, what was very interesting, I went to restaurants and said we’re Glovo, put yourself in the app, and we’ll deliver for you and the first reaction is “I don’t want to be in an app, it will ruin my experience with my customers”. 

And the second reaction was why I am paying you a commission because what you’re going to do is you’re going to take customers out of my restaurant, take the order at home and I have to pay your commission. They saw as a competitor – however, in reality we’re not a competitor. If I want to go to a restaurant with my friends, I won’t order in – am going there because of the entertainment? And I don’t go to the same restaurant every night, it’s a different one. 

So this is entertainment and Glovo is not entertainment. The funny thing is once you found your favorite hamburger, whatever it is high end low end or once you find your favorite Thai restaurant or healthy, you generally repeat. I don’t eat hamburgers every night but when I do I order my favorite one. So, Glovo is not competing is not with restaurants, it’s competing with home cooking. The whole thing is about fun entertainment. experience, and necessity and convenience. 

And then finally, we call everything that’s not restaurant food – quick commerce. And I think for retailers I think it’s gonna be a big tendency in e- commerce to to move to q-commerce, because quick commerce is gonna be a very important part of commerce. And that’s where Glovo fits in – we’re a facilitator for that. I think retailers are in a unique position to take advantage of this and they should really jump on it.

In terms of expansion, can we see Glovo in Macedonia any time soon?

We’re really focused on profitability. The next semester will be the first profitable semester in Glovo’s life, it took us nine and a half years and our expansion is focused primarily in countries where we already operate in, expanding in cities and secondly, expanding the category offering and expanding the amount of stores. 

There will be another phase where we launch new countries, I don’t think it’ll be this year, and the expansion areas will definitely be Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. 

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