Ukrainian delivery service Raketa rebrands, enters foreign markets

Ukrainian delivery service Raketa has changed its name to Rocket to make it it work on foreign markets as it started operating in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, the company announced on Dec. 23.

The company plans to launch its service in 10 more countries over the next year aiming at 15% of market share in these countries.

In particular, the company is going to launch its service in the Netherlands in March 2021. However, the company hasn’t disclosed the full list of countries it plans to work in.

There are several reasons to start expansion to other international markets from Cyprus, Oleksii Yukhymchuk, cofounder of the company, told the Novoye Vremya magazine: Cyprus is a small country with few rivals, it has a post-Soviet diaspora and shares the same time zone with Ukraine.

“Now our company’s goal is to expand beyond Ukraine in order to avoid the risk of being present only in one country,” Yukhymchuk said.

In order to ease the expansion to the Netherlands, Rocket will open an office in Amsterdam, hiring there staff needed to launch delivery services there. The core of the company, including programmers and analysts, however, will remain in Ukraine.

The company also continues expanding across Ukraine, expecting to roll out the service in Kropyvnytskyi by the end of the year.

Founded in Dnipro in 2018, the company currently operates in 26 Ukrainian cities.

In spring 2020, the company attracted investment from the BeeVentures fund — the only external investor Rocket has ever had — to scale its business in Ukraine and beyond. At the time, from March to May, Ukraine was going through a strict quarantine that forced many eateries to stop servicing clients indoors, which meant a huge spike of orders for delivery firms like Rocket. The number of orders via the Rocket app increased by 25-40%, Stanislav Dmytryk, the company’s cofounder, told local media The Village Ukraine.

The companies haven’t disclosed the sum of the investment.