Huuva Raises $5.22M for Virtual Restaurant Platform

Finnish delivery kitchen startup Huuva has raised more than $5.2 million in an investment round, saying it will use the money to expand across Central Europe, add 100 new employees and increase its neighborhood-first focus, according to a Tech Funding News report Wednesday (June 1).

Venture capital firm General Catalyst led Huuva’s fundraising round, with participation from Lifeline Ventures and several angel investors, including Laurel Bowden and Ilkka Paananen.

“Restaurant offerings outside city centers are close to non-existent,” said Ville Leppälä, co-founder and CEO of Huuva, in the report. “We’re on a mission to revolutionize the restaurant offering in underserved neighborhoods.

“We believe that the trendiest, most popular restaurants shouldn’t be the privilege of city centers or certain hot spots – and that the neighborhoods in the city outskirts should have other high-quality options than the average multinational restaurant chains,” he said.

Founded in 2021 by Leppälä and Ville Lehto in Helsinki, Huuva builds delivery-focused restaurant cohorts around cities and suburbs to bring new restaurant options to unserved neighborhoods. Since September, the startup has opened six kitchens around the greater Helsinki area.

Each Huuva kitchen gathers three to six restaurant brands under one roof, enabling consumers to order their meals from multiple brands in one delivery. Huuva offers end-to-end services for restaurants joining its kitchen cohorts, so they can expand in days instead of months.

Related: Transparency Enables Cross-Brand Synergy for Virtual Restaurants

Ahmed Omar, owner of Pizza and Wings Express, an Arizona-based five-location chain that prepares foods for a range of delivery-only brands from plug-and-play virtual brands platform Popchew, noted in a recent interview with PYMNTS that he was surprised by consumers’ familiarity with the ghost kitchen concept.

Omar argued that, when customers know which restaurant their virtual brand meal is coming from, it can bring fans of that brand in the door, enabling sales opportunities for the brick-and-mortar host. He cited the example of a customer who walked into a Pizza and Wings Express location asking to order from virtual brand Wings SZN.