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$43M for food sharing platform OLIO to accelerate fight against food waste

2 min read
AUTHOR: Tilly St Aubyn
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food waste

OLIO, a UK start-up seeking to combat food waste through food sharing, has raised $43M in its Series B funding round.

Founded in 2015, the start-up enables people to share unwanted food with the local neighbourhood by uploading a photograph of it onto an app. Neighbours can take request the food and collect it. OLIO says to have enabled over 27M portions of food to be shared globally since its inception.

The start-up has also worked with Tesco which used the OLIO platform to redistribute surplus food from 2,700 stores.

OLIO’s Series B investment round was led by Swedish investment firm VNV Global, US hedge fund, Lugard Road Capital/Luxor and Berlin-based VC fund, DX Ventures. Already existing investors include VC firms, Octopus Ventures, Accel and Rubio. Additional individual investors are Grimsby Town Football Club Chairman, Jason Stockwood, and media entrepreneur, Lord Waheed Alli. The Series B adds to OLIO’s Series A round of funding in 2018 where the start-up raised $6M.

With the funding, OLIO will push its international reach with a particular focus on what it sees as ten growing markets in Latin America, Northern Europe and Asia. It will also grow its employee network.

LIO Co-Founder, Tessa Clarke said to Tech Crunch: “OLIO has grown five times over the last year, reflecting a step change that’s taken place as businesses and citizens look to be more sustainable and connect with their local communities. We’re beyond thrilled to have raised this capital from a brilliant set of investors who are backing our vision of reinventing consumption for more than one billion OLIOers by 2030.

“We have this enormous ambition because humanity cannot continue to puzzle over how to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees and feed a population of 10 billion — whilst continuing to throw away one-third of the food we produce, and consuming as if we have 1.75 planets. In solving these twin problems we aim to build one of the most transformational companies of our generation” she added.

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