Mexican Online Supermarket Jüsto Raises US$12 Million

Mexican online supermarket Jüsto raised US$12 million in a new investment round to strengthen its operations amid a pickup in demand due to COVID-19 lockdown measures. With the bridge round, Jüsto's financing reached more than US$20 million in less than a year. 

“We never imagined how much impact our day-to-day was going to have in such a short time. We launched operations in September 2019, so most of our processes are still a work in progress. Hence, over the last couple of weeks, we had to iterate and evolve faster to keep operations going. We had a 300 percent increase in demand from one day to the next. However, we are stepping up to the challenge,” Founder & CEO of Jüsto Ricardo Weder said in an interview with Mexico Business News. 

In November, the company raised US$10 million in the first round of investment led by Foundation Capital, in which Mountain Nazca Quiet Capital, Vas Ventures, FEMSA Ventures and 500 startups also participated.

Jüsto appeared in September last year and has different distribution centers located in Mexico City. By not having physical stores, the online supermarket has managed to reduce product losses to only 3 percent. “We have no stores, which means theft is non-existent. Looking at other public online grocers like Ocado in the UK, waste is less than 1 percent against traditional supermarkets,” said Weder.

In the short term, the company plans to reach other cities in the country and aims to establish itself as an online supermarket with most customers in Latin America. It plans to jump to Colombia, although it has not yet defined the date of its arrival. “Mexico City is one of the largest, richest and most populated urban areas in the world. We are fortunate to have started operations here. We call it our petri dish. Think about it as a massive laboratory for experimentation. If we can get it right here, we can get it right anywhere. So, we are fine-tuning our model before we kick-off our expansion plans,” he told MBN.

Among the product categories with the highest demand in the platform are hygiene and beauty products, home and cleaning, pantry and pet items. Jüsto's prices are equivalent to those of a normal supermarket and the platform offers the option of urgent deliveries or scheduling of deliveries.

Jüsto, which has 5,000 products in total in its platform, is also facing competition from Walmart and Cornershop that also have seen a surge in demand. In October 2019, Uber announced the acquisition of Cornershop, a delivery service platform for groceries. However, both companies are still waiting for the Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE) to approve the acquisition in Mexico, which could take place until the end of 2020.