Egypt’s elmenus secures investment from fodoora’s co-founder and Delivery Hero’s VP Julian Dames

elmenus, Egypt’s biggest food discovery & ordering platform, announced that it has secured an investment from Julian Dames, foodora’s co-founder and Delivery Hero VP. Dames has also joined the company’s board of advisors.

From 2015 onwards, Julian acted as MD and global CMO and was responsible for all consumer-facing parts of the business of the foodora group. After the IPO of Delivery Hero in 2017, Julian assumed responsibility for the foodpanda markets leading a major rebrand and product migration of the markets to the foodora platform. From 2018 onwards Julian acted as VP International Marketing for DeliveryHero SE, looking after the APAC region before he decided to leave DH beginning of 2019 to pursue new opportunities.

With extensive global experience in the food space (foodora was acquired by DeliveryHero in 2015), Dames will work closely with elmenus as it takes on Egypt’s online ordering market.

Founded in 2011 by Amir Allam to help people find the food they’ll love, elmenus is a platform built to answer the universal question, ‘What am I going to eat today?’. Having recently launched online ordering, and with over one million monthly users, elmenus has built the most comprehensive platform for restaurant information – with a focus on personalizing food recommendations using data it has already collected, and is optimizing, using AI.

“elmenus has a compelling position in the large Egyptian food delivery market. Their delivery order numbers in the first few months have been very impressive,” says Dames, commenting on his decision to join elmenus as an investor and an advisor. “The mainly phone-based market is just on the verge of going online. As a native Egyptian player with well-established positioning as the consumer’s go-to platform, and with strong ties in the restaurant sector, elmenus will be able to focus on features that are relevant for the Egyptian user (from consumer to delivery rider to restaurants) which may prove advantageous against the global competitors.”

In 2017, the Cairo-based elmenus raised $1.5m in Series A funding from Algebra Ventures, Egypt’s leading VC fund, to take on the underserved online ordering market in Egypt with very rapid success.

“As elmenus scales rapidly, Julian’s uniquely valuable experience and insights will help accelerate our growth and sharpen our focus as we grow,’ says Allam, elmenus’ CEO. “We’re continuously personalizing and enhancing users’ food experiences at scale. We’re very excited about working with Julian to take on the Egyptian food market; his bet on our vision is great validation for us.”

“I was convinced by the passionate elmenus team and its founder, Amir,” adds Dames. “The elmenus team have big plans for the future and I am really looking forward to working with them and sharing my experience.”

Recently, elmenus has been attracting top-tier talent to its management team, including Head of Marketing, Karim Ebeid (ex. Head of Growth at Glovo Egypt), CFO, Mohamed Younis (ex. Renaissance Capital), and Chief Strategy Officer, Mohamed Mossad (ex. Strategy Consultant at Bain Dubai).

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