After around 1.5 years of service in Singapore, the group-buying food-ordering website Gobble—co-founded by former Deliveroo executives—is closing its doors.
Instead, then browsing through delivery apps, Gobble let users see and choose what their peers had bought.
To address the decline in social contact among university students, the firm included group ordering and food-gifting services. A “Gobble party” might be organised by users, inviting friends to purchase cheap meals together.
Domenico Tan, a co-founder, stated on LinkedIn that Gobble’s B2C strategy “wasn’t sustainable” for it to have endured for a long time. Despite Gobble’s great sales volume, the CEO also remarked that margins were still too low.
“Ultimately, it came down to simple math, we failed to show a quick enough path to positive cashflow,” Tan said.
Gobble didn’t bring in enough money for the business to secure series A financing.
The Gobble team built the business to register US $340,000 in annual net sales at a 47% compound monthly growth rate, according to Tan’s co-founder Ashwin Purushottam, but they were unable to demonstrate a “rapid enough route” to positive cash flow.
“Running a group-buying marketplace in a space such as food-ordering, which has seen an onslaught of disappointing IPOs, set an unfortunate precedent for our next to fundraise,” Purushottam added.
Gobble received US $1.3 million in a seed round headed by Beenext and Flash Ventures in February 2022.
