Ryde (formerly Ryders) announced today that it has raised £2.5m to continue to expand its vision to become the world’s first fully integrated delivery management system.

“We want to unlock last-mile delivery for every business in the UK as we strongly believe hyper-localization is the future. “

Tackling one of the largest and most exciting markets across Europe, this round of funding comes off the back of not only a great idea but the need for an efficient workforce logistics solution servicing market disruptors such as Gorillas and Ocado.

This seed round was co-led by Forward Partners (who recently announced their IPO) and Triple Point, with participation from current investors Seedcamp and Swiss Founders Fund.

Alongside the institutional investors, the company continues to build an impressive list of angels, including Michael Pennington (Gumtree), Will Neale (Fonix), Matt Robinson (Go Cardless) and Ines Ures (former Deliveroo CMO).

The raise follows a pivot from their original platform – Gameplan, built to service enterprise clients in the events sector. “When Covid hit, we had to think on our feet,” commented CEO Mitchell. “100% of our customer base went into lock-down overnight, and we were under pressure to find a way forward.”

CTO Nimmo said, “We feel that at the moment, being an on-demand delivery worker sucks! Your job is essentially to sit on the street and hope for the best. Sometimes you get to work other times, you don’t. As we’ve built our rider app, we’ve focused a lot on improving this experience for them.”

Improving the experience has included better optimising their work offering so that a worker can blend scheduled and hourly shift jobs with on-demand work. As well as this, the app helps workers to map earnings and routes far more effectively than their competitors.