Two of the biggest growth drivers on social and e-commerce platforms are food and influencers. So it’s not surprising that startups are now taking it a step further and trying to combine the way the two work. In the latest round, a Berlin startup called Lanzar, which works with influencers and creatives to launch ad hoc food delivery brands, has raised $6.9 million (€6.5 million) in funding.
The startup’s food brands are cooked in conjunction with influencers in “virtual kitchens” — that is, empty rooms in existing restaurants and other retail kitchens, not ghost kitchens — and Lanch said its first effort is a pizza brand called “Happy Slice,” which includes German YouTubers Knossi and Trymacs, who sold more than 30,000 pizzas during the launch weekend, a windfall that caught the attention of investors. Now he is preparing for the second brand called “Loco Chicken” in collaboration with a German musician named Luciano. Crazy times.
Series A comes from Felix Capital and HV Capital, in which several people participate. The value is not disclosed.
The concept may seem a bit far-fetched. Take someone who is known for something other than food and now associate your brand with food – that just doesn’t seem like a surefire recipe for success.
It also doesn’t help that in the United States, where other startups are also testing similar concepts, the implementation seems to have left a very bad taste in the mouths of some people.
Virtual Dining Concepts, which has raised about $20 million according to Tone Book data, has worked with several household names since its founding in 2018. One of the largest, MrBeast, is currently involved in a lawsuit against VDC, which was later made public. Fans complained that MrBeast’s burgers were “disgusting” and “inedible” and VDC did not respond to MrBeast’s subsequent complaints. VCC is suing for $100 million. (Despite all this, the brand appears to still be going – the website is still here in the UK)
There are even some important similarities between Lanch and VDC. Both rely on influencer partnerships to create food delivery brands. These brands are then linked to ‘virtual kitchens’ (which are not exactly ghost kitchens, but rather free spaces in kitchens that can be connected to other restaurants or food services), which in turn prepare these products with ingredients from Lanch.
Both also outsource sales: brands are offered via food delivery platforms (in Europe for example: Delivery Hero, Just Eat or Deliveroo) to get them to customers.
But Nono Konopka, co-founder of Lanch with Dominic Kluge, Jonas Meynert and Kevin Kock, believes Lanch is taking a more technology-focused approach than its US counterparts, which will add some much-needed umami to its business model. that is, in the form of data.
“We focused on technology from the beginning,” he said in an interview, “in developing quality control software that measures qualitative and quantitative data.”
The goal is to provide YouTubers with more information so they can connect with their audience, but also understand what they like and want. For them, data is a great asset to expand their audience and understand what to do more or less in the future, and to generate more sponsorships and other revenue-generating activities.
Lanch also sends data to the other side of its market, the restaurants it works with. One of the most important things restaurants need to do is increase the number of customers and maximize the use of staff and resources to avoid waste: Lanch argues that this can help them use their kitchens more efficiently and attract significantly more direct customers and data to acquire. about what is in demand; if something is “disgusting”, a warning to fix it; and more.
The hope is that all this will prevent scandals a la MrBeast.
Lanch started with 70 restaurants for Happy Slice and says it will grow to 100 for Loco Chicken. Next year there will be a total of more than 500 locations. It then plans to expand beyond delivery to include physical meals and other food-related products and experiences.
Restaurants receive 1/3 of the profits, the rest is divided between influencers, delivery platforms and Lanch itself. He says that his first brand, which has been around for about four months now, has already made about seven payments.
“The ‘power of brands’ is a core belief we have held since Felix’s founding,” said Frederic Court, founder of Felix Capital. “As time goes by, we become more and more convinced of the superpowers that creatives have in today’s digitalized world, and we are impressed by Lanch’s distinctive and innovative positioning in the community.”
The company is currently working on launching in Austria and plans to expand to the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands and France, where it will work with three or four developers per market, a much more palatable number, Konopka said.
Source: La Neta Neta

Jason Jack is an experienced technology journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in computer science and engineering, he has a deep understanding of the latest technology trends and developments. He writes about a wide range of technology topics, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, software development, and cybersecurity.