A fleet of mobile restaurants with a disruptive new business model
-
STATUS
Active
-
Year
2020
-
LOCATION
New York City
KEY TRANSACTION DETAILS
- 2020 Series A (Bain Capital Ventures)
- 2022 Series B (Bain Capital Ventures)
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
A new kind of home dining experience - extraordinary food made to order in a mobile restaurant that comes to you.
130,000+
Households served
THE BAIN CAPITAL ADVANTAGE AT WORK
Bain Capital views radical business model innovations as highly exciting investment opportunities, just as important for delivering lasting value for the world as software solutions that automate business processes or consumer apps that change how we interact with one another. As such, we have not shied away from technology investments where success hinges on inventing, developing and scaling complex logistical operations that transform industries.
Wonder is a food delivery service that operates a fleet of mobile restaurants carrying partially prepared meals that get finalized in the trucks and delivered fresh and hot in residential neighborhoods, started locally in New Jersey. The company offers menus designed by celebrity chefs and top restaurants that are optimized for preparation real-time onboard the mobile restaurants, enabling a restaurant-quality food experience delivered in minutes to the customer’s doorstep. This is, of course, an operationally difficult problem, and Wonder’s ambition is to solve it and change home dining forever.
Bain Capital was invited to be a partner to Wonder by founder Marc Lore, who we had backed as the founder of Jet.com in 2014. Two years later, Jet.com was sold to Walmart for $3.2 billion and Lore became CEO of Walmart U.S. eCommerce. Backing a founder as accomplished as Marc gave us confidence in the company’s vision, which has been proven out in the ensuing months as Wonder continues to reach and surpass the ambitious milestones it established at its founding.
Our investment in Wonder shows not only the value of our network of extraordinary, serial entrepreneurs but also our appetite for embracing disruptive business ideas that involve capital intensity and execution risk. While some might hear about Wonder and think it’s a moonshot proposition too risky for investment, Bain Capital has a conviction view that the future is built on moonshots, and we invest behind them.
Wonder has dramatically reimagined prepared food delivery in a way that has incredible quality from recognized top chefs and restaurants at an affordable price point. To pull this off requires dealing with a level of operational complexity manageable by very few start-up teams. We are so fortunate to have a long-standing relationship with founder Marc Lore and his incredible and highly experienced management team, which helped us get comfortable with the risks associated with this extremely large opportunity.
