Czech grocery delivery unicorn Rohlik is launching a new company to sell the technology it says has been crucial to its success to others.
Founded in 2014 Rohlik — which secured a $1.2bn valuation in 2021 and has raised $593m to date — has outlived many of the other companies looking to disrupt the market, hitting profitability while its competitors dwindled.
The new company which will sell the tech, Veloq, will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Rohlik. As well as software, Veloq will set up warehouses for its customers, and provide operational support.
Richard McKenzie, former chief commercial officer at grocery giant Ocado who’ll lead Veloq, credits Rohlik’s success to the tech stack it’ll now sell.
“We have automated fulfillment centers that are efficient, and both capital and labour efficient,” he says. The company can go from picking an item off its shelf to dispatching it from the warehouse in 12 minutes, McKenzie says.
AWS for grocery delivery
Veloq’s target market is large grocery companies looking to expand their same day delivery offering. The company’s primary sales focus is North America and Europe.
Competition includes Transcend, software sold by UK supermarket giant Tesco — though Veloq’s offering helps companies deliver from warehouses, while Transcend’s tech focuses on delivery from supermarkets.
McKenzie says the opportunity is large — comparing it to AWS, a cloud computing platform developed by Amazon and used by many companies, including Amazon competitors.
“One of the questions we get is: ‘are you going to sell it to your competitors?’ Nobody says that about Amazon now, when there's lots of retailers sitting on AWS.”
Hitting profitability
Rohlik is EBITDA profitable in the Czech Republic and Hungary and generated €1.1bn in the year up to April 2025, a 37% increase year-on-year.
The company is backed by VCs including Index, Partech and Sofina. It’s active in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Romania.
Rohlik delivers orders within three hours, though customers can also pay extra for delivery within an hour. The company offers 25k grocery items.
That means Rohlik delivers more items at a slower pace than the other grocery startups. When Turkish speedy grocery company Getir was active in Europe, for example, it aimed to deliver in 10 minutes and offered 2,000 items. Getir exited all European markets last year.
McKenzie says Rohlik’s larger assortment of items is what enabled it to hit profitability, because it means people do larger shops, bringing the cost of delivering each item down.
Rohlik isn’t the first startup to sell the software it relies on to others. The UK’s Octopus Energy, for example, has a growing software business, selling the tech it uses itself to other energy companies.
