Egypt’s Find-What-You-Will-Eat-Today Startup Elmenus Wins Investment From Delivery Hero’s Julian Dames
Cairo-based food discovery and ordering platform, Elmenus, has won over investment from Julian Dames, Foodora‘s co-founder and VP of Delivery Hero, the startup announced today in a statement to WeeTracker. The funding is part of an ongoing Series B and sees Julian joining Elmenus’ board of advisors.
Julian In, Elmenus Stronger
Julian served as the MD and Global CMO in the Rocket Internet-backed German Foodora Group as from 2015, calling the shorts for all the arms of the business that are focused on consumers.
After Delivery Hero went public in 2017, he assumed responsibility for the foodpanda markets, leading a major rebrand and product migration of the markets to the Foodora platform. Julian left the company last year in search of new opportunities.
From 2018 onwards, Julian acted as VP International Marketing for Delivery Hero SE, looking after the APAC region before he decided to leave DH beginning of 2019 to pursue new opportunities.
Interestingly, Foodora was acquired by Delivery Hero in 2015. With extensive global experience in the food space, Dames will work closely with elmenus as it takes on Egypt’s online ordering market.
Elmenus was founded in 2011 by Amir Allam to help people find the food they love. The platform was built to answer the question, “What will I eat today?” The startup recently launched online ordering, and now claims to have more than one million monthly users.
Having built the most comprehensive platform for restaurant information, it easily one of the most significant restaurant portals in Egypt. It focuses on personalizing food recommendations using data it has already collected and is optimizing, using AI. ‘elmenus has a compelling position in the large Egyptian food delivery market.
“Compelling Position In Egypt’s Food Delivery Market”
“Their delivery order numbers in the first few months have been very impressive,” says Dames, commenting on his decision to join elmenus as an investor and an advisor. “The mainly phone-based market is just on the verge of going online.
As a native Egyptian player with well-established positioning as the consumer’s go-to platform, and with strong ties in the restaurant sector, elmenus will be able to focus on features that are relevant for the Egyptian user (from consumer to delivery rider to restaurants) which may prove advantageous against the global competitors”.
In 2017, the Elmenus raised USD 1.5m in Series A funding from Algebra Ventures, Egypt’s leading VC fund, to take on the underserved online ordering market in Egypt with very rapid success. ‘As elmenus scales rapidly, Julian’s uniquely valuable experience and insights will help accelerate our growth and sharpen our focus as we grow,’ says Allam, elmenus’ CEO.
‘We’re obsessively personalizing and enhancing users’ food experiences at scale. We’re very excited about working with Julian to take on the Egyptian food market; his bet on our vision is great validation for us”.
“I was convinced by the passionate elmenus team and its founder, Amir,’ adds Dames. ‘The guys from elmenus have big plans for the future, and I am really looking forward to working with them and sharing my experience.’
Recently, elmenus has been attracting top-tier talent to its management team, including Head of Marketing, Karim Ebeid (ex. Head of Growth at Glovo Egypt), CFO, Mohamed Younis (ex. Renaissance Capital), and Chief Strategy Officer, Mohamed Mossad (ex. Strategy Consultant at Bain Dubai).
