Russian grocery delivery service Samokat launches in the USA

Samokat, a grocery, household goods and cosmetics delivery service, part of a joint venture between Sberbank and Mail.ru Group, plans to launch in the US market under a new brand. This was told to The Bell by a source close to the company, and confirmed by an interlocutor from among the employees of the ecosystem.

According to a source familiar with the situation, the exit is planned in the horizon from several months to a year. The discussion of such plans within the joint venture between Sberbank and Mail.ru Group was confirmed by another interlocutor of the publication from among the employees of the ecosystem.

The name "Scooter" in the US market will not be used, says the source of The Bell. Under what brand the project will operate in the US has not yet been decided. The team that will develop the American direction will also be assembled on site. “The idea will be transferred to the US market, partly the technology of Scooter, but not the brand and not the people,” says a source close to The Bell.

The amount that the company will spend on expansion, the number of darkstores has not yet been determined: the costs directly depend on the scale of the launch, which is under discussion with shareholders, the interlocutors add.

Representatives of the company initially declined to comment on The Bell, but after the release of the text, Vyacheslav Bocharov, co-founder of Samokat, confirmed the fact of the release in the United States and added that the service would start in New York this summer. “Today, Samokat operates in 18 Russian cities and continues to open 80 dark stores per month. We are growing rapidly and we know that we can do even more,” says Bocharov. “The service will have a new name, but it will retain an important one: our desire to free people from the routine and real-time retail technology that we create.”

Scooter was launched in 2018 by Vyacheslav Bocharov and Rodion Shishkov, former top managers of Russian Post and Magnit. In Russia, the company operates on behalf of Smart Retail LLC and Smart Space LLC, both owned by the Cypriot company Roboretail, LTD.

In 2019, Samokat raised $10 million from Sergey Gordeev's PIK group of companies. PIK Investments then received 27% of Roboretail, LTD. In May 2020, a controlling stake in Samokat (75.6%) was bought by a joint venture between Sberbank and Mail.ru Group O2O Holding, the amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

The service was growing rapidly thanks to the pandemic: by the end of 2020, Samokat had 400 darkstores, 8,000 connected couriers, and the company's annual revenue amounted to 9.7 billion rubles. Since mid-2020, Samokat has begun active expansion into the regions of Russia, launching delivery in the Moscow and Leningrad regions, Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod, and in 2021 in Krasnodar, Samara, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk. Today the company operates in 15 cities of Russia.

If the American project is launched, the United States will become the first foreign country in which the Scooter will operate.

Russians deliver

Several services for express delivery of products founded by Russians are already operating on the American market. The Fridge No More startup is developing in New York, which was launched in 2020 by one of the Samokat investors Pavel Danilov and Coub co-founder Anton Gladkoborodov. In March, the project raised $15.4 million from Insight Partners and other investors. Also this year, Vitaly Aleksandrov's Food Rocket service began operating on the US East Coast. $2 million in the startup . invested In April , a pool of investors led by Baring Vostok and AltaIR Capital funds

Cover photo: TASS