Groceries in 10 Minutes: Delivery Start-Ups Crowd City Streets Across Globe

Venture capital’s newest darling is the online rapid grocery delivery industry. Getir, a six-year-old Turkish company, is trying to outpace its new competitors in a worldwide expansion.

LONDON — Zipping around central London, among the bikes and scooters of Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo, is a new entrant promising almost instantaneous satisfaction for your craving for a bar of chocolate or pint of ice cream: Getir, a Turkish company that says it will deliver your groceries in 10 minutes. The speed of Getir’s deliveries, from a network of neighborhood warehouses, matches the astonishing pace of the company’s recent expansion. After five and a half years pioneering the model in Turkey, it suddenly opened in six European countries this year, bought a rival and, by the end of 2021, expects to be in at least three American cities, including New York. In just six months, Getir raised nearly $1 billion to fuel this outburst. “We accelerated our plans to go to more countries because if we don’t, others do,” said Nazim Salur, a founder of Getir (the word is Turkish for “bring”). “It’s a race against time.”