Hospitality and retail technology startup Up.co has secured £7m in its latest funding round, with funding coming from Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield, alcoholic drinks company Jägermeister, and previous Innocent Smoothie founders fund JamJar Investments.
Up.co said it will use the funding to accelerate its expansion across the UK and Europe and hire new talent. It is also planning on building what it calls a “super app,” which will be launched this year.
The proposed super app will bring together Up.co’s subsidiaries, which include mobile charging network ChargedUp, hand sanitising services CleanedUp and mobile table service venture ServedUp.
The UK startup is also planning on combining its ServedUp and ChargedUp services to create a new “full-service platform”, under the original ChargedUp brand.
This new platform will aim to help people discover info, book services, order and pay while keeping their phone charged. The startup says it’s already serving over 35,000 venues across Europe, and the combination of its two platforms should bring together two million users from ServedUp and another one million from ChargedUp.
ChargedUp’s shared power banks can now be found in over 50 European cities, with UK locations including shopping centres Westfield London and Westfield Stratford.
Blomfield, who stepped down as Monzo CEO last year and has moved into the VC space, said: “Bars and restaurants were hit really hard in the pandemic, and some sadly closed. It’s wonderful to see them now reopening, and our cities coming back to life. I’m delighted to be a backer of ChargedUp, a company that’s playing an integral part in that recovery by making it incredibly quick and simple for customers to order and pay.”
Up.co was founded in 2017 by Hugo Tilmouth and Charlie Baron.
“By unifying all of the brands under ChargedUp, we believe we can empower consumers and the trade through a full suite of digital solutions,” said Up.co chief executive, Hugo Tilmouth. “Ultimately, we want to make hospitality as frictionless and data-driven as e-commerce – think of it like the Amazon GO of hospitality.”
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