GetHenry raises €16.5m in seed funding led by LocalGlobe

• GetHenry offers a tailor-made mobility service that allows logistics companies to subscribe to e-bikes including regular maintenance and software - providing sustainable solutions in the booming last-mile delivery market

• in 2021, the startup saw the business take-off with 29 new city launches across Germany, Austria and Italy. Now it has raised €16.5 million in funding, led by LocalGlobe, Visionaries Club, Founder Collective and Third Sphere and strategic angel investors from Voi, Tier and Everphone

• GetHenry will launch in Spain, the Netherlands and France in the next few months with more European countries expected to follow

• the startup will also expand its own brand e-bike fleet to 10,000 bikes and diversify its product portfolio with cargo bikes and electric mopeds as the company moves towards designing and producing its own specialist courier devices

GetHenry, the full service mobility solution for last-mile delivery companies and couriers, has raised €16.5 million in a seed funding round led by LocalGlobe. Visionaries Club, Founder Collective, EnBW New Ventures (ENV), GreenPoint Partners, SpeedUp Ventures and Third Sphere also participated in the round, along with initial investors APX and previous investors InnoEnergy, and angel investors including Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm, former Tier COO Roger Hassan, and Everphone CEO Jan Dzulko. The funding, a mix of €10m equity and €6.5m debt, comes ahead of a year that will see the company, which already supplies e-bikes to Germany’s largest groceries-on-demand businesses (e.g. Gorillas and Flink), expand the business across Europe and add new verticals.

Founders and cousins Luis Orsini-Rosenberg and Nikodemus Seilern, both of whom have backgrounds in the international mobility industry, initially launched GetHenry in 2019, focusing on the hospitality industry, specifically providing hotels with fleets of e-scooters for their guests. The arrival of the pandemic in 2020 saw GetHenry pivot its focus to providing restaurants and individual couriers with a monthly full service e-bike subscription, before extending its offering to last-mile delivery companies including Gorillas, Flink, Just Eat Takeaway.com, MAYD, and arive.

While companies like Gorillas focus on their core delivery process, GetHenry’s innovative subscription service takes care of everything else, from producing and financing high-end e-bikes, to on-demand maintenance services from a team of highly skilled mechanics and dealing with the supply chain for components. This expertise, built up through serving customers across 50 cities including Rome, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, guarantees delivery companies peace of mind. Not only can they depend on their bikes to help them deliver 365 days a year, they are also fully supported. This is thanks to a bespoke software dashboard that provides real-time data to track, optimise and predict the utility of the company’s e-bike fleet, backed up by a team of expert mechanical engineers available on demand to provide a premium repair service when necessary. One of the company’s key selling points is demonstrated in the uptime of their vehicles - at any given time, on average above 90% of GetHenry’s vehicles in their fleet are available for use across all of their customers.

European expansion and e-bike production

Following the seed funding raise, GetHenry is set to launch throughout France, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK with country managers already being hired in Paris and Amsterdam, as well as launch in more European countries later this year. The company will also use the funding to diversify its product portfolio, with cargo bikes and electric mopeds added to its fleets to expand capacity for its customers’ couriers.

After making millions of deliveries last year, repairing tens of thousands of bikes and listening to the needs of its customers, GetHenry is taking the knowledge it has gained and channelling it into designing and producing their own specialist courier devices. The new German-engineered bikes are created to handle the 80 km-a-day that delivery couriers travel, as well as all the additional weight that puts traditional bikes under enormous amounts of pressure. They have been manufactured with longevity and sustainability in mind in order to support couriers and primarily make their lives easier.

For couriers, their safety really depends on the performance of their vehicle, and that’s where GetHenry, regardless of weather conditions, is able to provide the very best infrastructure for their day to day. By owning the production process end to end, GetHenry is also shoring up its offering in the midst of an ongoing global supply crisis that continues to cause delays and problems for the bike industry.

Sustainable hardware for the on-demand delivery sector

As the on-demand delivery sector boomed - with food delivery alone now worth more than $151bn in 2021 - GetHenry also saw a stratospheric increase in demand, bringing in dozens of new customers, with many recognising that generic bikes and e-bikes were not suitable for the heavy demands of every-day deliveries. Last year, the company’s service powered 3 million deliveries and meant the company’s bikes were travelling the same distance to the moon and back each week. The company itself has expanded to match this demand, from five to over 80 employees, with numerous new e-bike mechatronics joining the team across Europe every week.

As well as catering for the explosion in on-demand delivery, GetHenry’s solution is also increasingly relevant for large, traditional logistics companies, who are considering how they can address the emissions caused by last mile delivery and make their services more sustainable. The last mile delivery of products outside of the food/grocery industry (e.g. pharmacy, fashion, books, consumer electronics) causes an average of 225g of CO2 emissions per delivery using diesel vans in Germany. E-bikes reduce these emissions by 90%, or by a third when compared with electric vans. As the sector continues to expand in this way, GetHenry believes at least 50% of current last-mile deliveries could be handled by its e-bikes or larger cargo bikes, meaning more space on busy inner-city roads as well as a significant reduction in pollution.