Kiwi sells it’s Lulo product to focus on the future

As has been reported this week, one of the companies from my portfolio, Kiwi, sold one of their digital products called Lulo to Merqueo, whose founders are also the founders of Domicilios, acquired over a year ago by Delivery Hero. The funds generated from the sale will allow the company to focus on one product, a chat application for ordering all types of products and services.

I first met the original co-founders, Felipe Chavez and Javier Santiago Lozano, more than two years ago and was impressed from the start. Santiago has always been passionate about building great products. He is amazingly talented in a number of areas including, but not limited to, developing and designing great software products. Felipe complements Santiago through his determination and drive to build an organization. They believe in hiring the most talented people that are equally inspired by what the company is trying to accomplish.

Kiwi solves an important problem which some called “application fatigue” caused by users having to download multiple apps to accomplish different tasks. By offering users a simple text interface and integrating the back end with other services such as Uber and delivery apps, among others, these can get things done all through this one app. Other players such as Magic and GoButler are doing this in the states (and others in Asia). Nonetheless, Kiwi is testing their technology in a variety of communities to analyze the impact the impact of this tool in a variety of contexts.

This is a pretty exciting space that some call “invisible apps.”  Big players such as Apple, Google and others are already preparing for it.  My take on this is that the web’s “intelligence layer” will start to improve in an accelerated fashion thanks to advances in context-awaredness (I doubt that’s the way it should be conjugated), Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and other technologies.  It’s tough to say what it’s going to all look like and where the white spaces will be, but one goal is clear: to make it easier for users to get sh#t done.

Two of the co-founders will be living in Santiago, Chile in the coming months since they were one of several startups selected within the next cohort of the Startup Chile program. With the funds from this program, they will be investing in developing their product further and testing honing their ability to launch in new geographies.

I’m super excited about this phase in their evolution. Though they’ve been very Colombia-focused during the initial development phase, I really think they have the potential to create a global product with an incredibly scalable business model. There are still quite a few things to work out, but they’ve got a strong team and a lot of grit and determination on their side. 😃