A Santa Clara, Calif. startup called JoyRun has raised about $10 million in Series A and seed funding for its peer-to-peer food and drinks delivery app. Floodgate led the $8.5 million Series A round in JoyRun, and Norwest Venture Partners led the company’s earlier $1.3 million seed round. Other investors joining both rounds included Visionnaire Ventures, Morado Ventures, CrunchFund, TriplePoint Capital and individual angels.
It may be hard to believe that VCs are still putting money into food delivery concepts that don’t involve self-driving cars, robots or drones. The field is cluttered with competition ranging from Amazon Restaurants, UberEATs and good-old GrubHub, to DoorDash, Postmates, Waitr, Drizly, Saucey and scores of others.
What’s new about JoyRun is not so much technology as business model innovation. The company’s app lets people find out who, nearby, is already heading out to a restaurant that they like, then tack on an order of their own.
If a nearby user accepts the request, they will pick up and deliver the order for a fee, or just do it as a favor. Users who offer to be “runners” have the option to waive their fee for specific community members. This, of course,…