https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/05/zebra-fuel/
Zebra Fuel,
a London-based startup that wants to eliminate the inner city gas
station by delivering fuel directly to your vehicle, has raised $2.5
million in seed funding.
The round is led by Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe, with
participation from Brent Hoberman’s Firstminute Capital, and Alex
Chesterman, the Zoopla founder and one of the U.K.’s more active angel
investors.
Despite the familiar investor lineup, it’s actually the first investment made by Firstminute, the recently launched $85 million pan-European seed fund.
Founded in 2016 by Reda Bennis and Romain Saint Guilhem, Zebra Fuel
is attempting to bring the convenience of on-demand delivery (or, more
accurately, book ahead delivery, since it isn’t really on-demand) to
refuelling your car. Via the startup’s smart phone app, you can book a
time-slot to have one of Zebra Fuel’s mini-vans and trained personnel
come to your location to dispense fuel to your vehicle.
For the time being, the company only offers diesel and delivers to
inner city London, although petrol, hydrogen and even electric is on the
roadmap. As is expanding to other European cities.
The idea, Bennis told me on a fun and rapid-fire call, is to
eliminate the need to ever queue at a gas station again, which is not
only inconvenient and time-consuming, but often sees a driver make an
additional roundtrip journey and having to leave the engine running
while in situ waiting for a pump to become available.
By bringing fuel to you and others in your neighbourhood, a
proposition like Zebra at scale could help cut emissions and reduce
congestion. Or so the pitch perfect pitch goes.
So what about the business case? The reaction from almost everybody
I’ve explained Zebra Fuel to was to presume it will work out more
expensive than visiting a gas station. Not so, says Bennis, although he
concedes people are sceptical at first (and even more so before the
company introduced a small delivery charge, which actually helped
increase conversion significantly).
Instead, Zebra claims to be price competitive with inner city gas
stations — offering fuel at prices on a par with or cheaper than central
London — because it sources fuel from the same wholesale suppliers as
the leading petrol stations and doesn’t have to soak up the high costs
of rent for each premium gas station location.
In turn, the Zebra Fuel mini-vans themselves don’t need to travel to
the wholesale supplier, but are refueled by the Zebra Fuel “mother
ship,” says Bennis, a much larger tanker able to restock multiple Zebra
Fuel delivery vehicles.
The startup is also well-positioned to offer a B2B service. This sees
it bring fuel direct to commercial fleets, which are typically parked
overnight in one central location.
In fact, whether consumer or business, overnight refuelling is a
popular option. You can even instruct the Zebra Fuel app that you’ve
left your fuel cap unlocked to negate having to be present when your
vehicle is refueled, an idea first suggested by a disabled driver and
early Zebra Fuel customer, and evidence that improving accessibility
often benefits everybody. Connected cars could see this integrated at
the API level, too: book a Zebra Fuel refill via your dashboard and your
car will unlock its fuel cap at the right time.
Like a “Formula 1 pit stop,” is how the Zebra Fuel co-founder
describes the service overall, and it’s not hard to imagine the startup
expanding into other car health check or maintenance products, such as
tire pressure and even MOTs.
The humble motor car, especially for city dwellers, is such an
under-utilised asset, yet it consumes a disproportionate amount of its
owners time and money. A sentiment and reality this nascent London
startup hopes a large business can be built on.
