Cajoo

» see cajoo.eu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Cajoo was founded in Paris in January 2021 by three associates with Henri Capoul as chief executive, into a market the lockdowns had invented about ten minutes earlier. The promise was groceries at your door in fifteen minutes, which only works if the stock is already around the corner from you, so the model was the dark store: a warehouse of roughly a hundred square meters, closed to the public, covering a two kilometer radius. It opened in the 9th arrondissement and spread outward from there.

The app carried about 3,000 products at ordinary supermarket prices, and that last part is what made it work. Running from seven in the morning until midnight on weekdays and until two in the morning at weekends, it reached fifteen French cities during 2022. Unlike the food delivery platforms it was often filed next to, Cajoo put its riders on salaried contracts rather than independent status, and had around 600 of them.

Money arrived at the speed of the era. Six million euros of seed funding in February 2021, then a round of about forty million dollars in September once Carrefour came in as an investor and exclusive supply partner. The company claimed 150,000 users that September and 350,000 a year later. Capoul's own summary at the end was that the team had built the whole thing in fifteen months.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the day carrefour picked a different horse ~

On 16 May 2022 the German company Flink announced it was buying Cajoo. Carrefour, which had funded Cajoo and supplied it, moved its chips across the table in the same motion: it became a direct shareholder in Flink and its exclusive commercial partner in France. The joint press release is unusually frank about what happens next. "Flink will be the only consumer brand in the future, since the rebranding will take place in the second quarter of 2022."

The numbers say it was bought on the way up. Cajoo ranked second in France with around 450,000 orders in the first quarter of 2022, from more than 400,000 people who had downloaded the app. Flink folded the stores into its own network to reach thirty hubs across nine cities and merged the team into its international organization. The name came off the app before the quarter was out, and the price was reportedly below what the last funding round had valued the company at.

~ the istanbul original ~

The odd thing about watching the European quick commerce wave from Ankara was that the category was not foreign at all. The whole idea had been running in Istanbul since 2015 under Getir, and by 2021 that company was expanding into the same European cities where Flink and its rivals were burning venture money on fifteen minute promises. The French startups were racing to introduce something Turkey had treated as ordinary for years, all of them working with capital that priced delivery below what it cost.

~ flink lasted two more years ~

Cajoo disappeared into a buyer that did not survive it by much. Flink's French operation went into liquidation in April 2024, and the court-supervised sale saved 270 of 480 jobs for 5.4 million euros. French commentators wrote it up as the end of quick commerce in the country rather than the end of one company, which was roughly right.

The two domains died at different speeds. cajoo.eu kept serving its cheerful marketing page, recruitment pitch for couriers and all, well into 2023, months after the brand it advertised had been retired and the app had become Flink. cajoo.fr now returns a hosting company's "site not installed" placeholder.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »