When a space is too crowded and more people come into it, there’s a saying in Spain that goes ‘éramos pocos y parió la abuela’. I don’t know how to properly translate that into English, but I do know that the logistics space pretty much looks like that in recent times.
Just over the past few days we’ve seen Spain-based startups such as Glovo or newborn Stuart raise significant rounds of funding. On top of that, the space is also being joined by companies such as Comprea, Delsuper or Deliberry that want to clone Instacart in Spain.
Well, there’s another startup joining the fray: Ermes, the new project of Bernardo Hernández, the former head of product at Flickr and co-founder of Fever, the local events company that has just raised a $12 million Series B round.
There’s not a lot of information out there and the company is not willing to disclose any details about their goal or current state of development. When I asked Bernardo about Ermes, he just said “we can’t say much yet”.
All we know about Ermes is that it promises to “disrupt last mile logistics” and that the company claims that users “love to shop online but hate coordinating home deliveries” (which is true), and that they will be “introducing the ultimate e-commerce delivery tool”.
The description sounds similar to startups such as Doorman or Roadrunnr.
Bernardo is joined in the project by Javier Sanz and Alberto Arranz, two Madrid-based entrepreneurs who had previously launched Fastisimo, a freight delivery startup that shut down in August.
According to Ermes’ profile on AngelList, Bernardo will serve as head of product. Him and his co-founders have yet to list the company on their LinkedIn profiles.
There are no funding details available about Ermes, but given the salaries the company is offering for two New York-based positions (€85K to €185K), it seems plausible that Bernardo -himself or through his fund Solon Inversiones- has allocated some capital to the young startup.
Update: A couple of sources have told me that Ermes is in the process of raising a €8 million pre-launch round.
In a recent interview at Madrid’s Google Campus, Bernardo said that he’s very interested in the logistics space. Ermes fits right into that curiosity, let’s see what they ship.
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