Oliver Merkel is a co-founder of Flink. The company was founded in Berlin at the end of 2020 by Merkel, Christoph Cordes, Julian Dames, Saad Saeed and Nikolas Bullwinkel.
The first funding round came in February 2021. In 2021 Flink overtook Gorillas as Europe's largest third-party quick-delivery service and was valued at $2.1 billion.
In 2022 it bought the French rival Cajoo for about €100 million and left Austria in December. In April 2024 its French subsidiary filed for bankruptcy.
Merkel and Cordes left in early 2025. Dames, who is CEO, continued to run Flink without them.