In October 2021 Gorillas fired 350 employees in Berlin. They had joined a wildcat strike over unpaid wages and heavy loads, and the company, then barely a year and a half old, answered by sending them letters. It was the moment the cheerful startup with the slogan 'faster than you' met the cost of its own speed.
Kağan Sümer, the Turkish entrepreneur who co-founded the company with Jörg Kattner in May 2020, had built it on a borrowed idea. The model was based on the American goPuff: small neighbourhood warehouses, bike couriers, a promise of groceries in minutes. Berlin in lockdown was the ideal place to test it.
The founders' own personal paths are thinly documented, and Sümer was reported to be leaving his role after the sale.
The money arrived with a speed that surprised even investors. A $44m Series A in December 2020 was followed by $290m in March 2021 from backers including Tencent, DST Global and Coatue. In October 2021 came a round of nearly $1bn, with Delivery Hero adding about $200m. Gorillas became a unicorn in about nine months, the fastest in Germany.
But the riders were carrying the weight. They reported heavy loads, back pain and pay problems. After the strike and the dismissals the company bought 1,200 e-bikes and introduced a bonus scheme, a late repair to a wound it had made itself.
What followed was a retreat. In 2022 Gorillas bought Frichti in France and launched its own-label products, but it was also leaving Belgium, Italy and Spain, closing most of its UK operations outside London and cancelling Switzerland and Australia. Sümer said he wanted to raise $700m to expand and become profitable. Instead, in December 2022 the Istanbul rival Getir bought Gorillas for $1.2bn. In February 2023 a UK regulator banned an advert as irresponsible, and by June 2023 Gorillas was leaving France. The last operations ended in April and May 2024.
The founders' own personal paths are thinly documented, and Sümer was reported to be leaving his role after the sale. What the record does show is a company that tried to do three hard things at once: grow faster than any German company before it, treat riders as the core asset, and make money on groceries that sell at near-cost.
The lesson for first-time founders is the order of operations. Growth can be bought. Trust from the people who actually deliver the product cannot be, and when the strike came, the speed that had made the brand became the story against it.