We are excited to be backing Ferto, an Athens-based last-mile logistics startup, alongside renowned business angels. Ferto is a last-mile delivery application that enables users to get almost anything from local stores, from grocery to liquor, from pet food to electronics, all within 20 minutes.

Thanks to food delivery services, consumers have become familiar with the convenience of delivery. However, the rest of the market lacks representation and only 10% of local businesses are able to ship their products to the consumers. Ferto is helping brick-and-mortar businesses compete, succeed, and flourish in these rapidly changing times and transition from offline to online. In fact, Ferto’s mission is helping to grow and empower local economies.

Understanding the Challenges of the Local Businesses

Local businesses cannot reach out beyond their four walls. Local store's ability is restricted by where they are located, their real estate, it’s physical, and they can’t take it anywhere else. Ferto takes local businesses and introduces them to the entire city and not just people walking in front of their door. In fact, they provide local businesses software and logistic services to address consumers’ expectations of ease and immediacy and thrive in today’s convenience economy. Provided software also allows stores to manage their inventory and digital storefront so that they do not need any solution for online presence other than Ferto to reach out to new customers.

Connecting local and national businesses through versatility

By building the last-mile logistics infrastructure for local commerce, Ferto is bringing communities closer. Ferto believes that people really love choices and everyone deserves access to a vibrant neighborhood that has a rich variety of choices and options. Their goal is to allow users to wander through a variety of all local stores that serve the users’ location.

Ferto provides a software and services platform that connects local stores, consumers and distributors achieving last-mile delivery of a large number of products in each category from local stores. Ferto offers an express delivery service, handling a variety of business categories and granting an affordable and consistent experience. At the same time, Ferto enables local stores to have exclusive distributors that facilitate instant local deliveries, without having to go through the recruitment process.

Ferto’s short-term goal is to spread geographically to numerous new districts, as well as to supplementary on-demand services. Some of the immediate plans of the company are the activation in other areas, expansion in the center of Athens and rapid coverage of the whole city, expansion of the store categories, but also collaborations with larger chain stores.

Meet the team behind Ferto

When we first met Ferto’s founders, we immediately knew that their team would execute properly and grow Ferto into a unicorn. The team behind Ferto has a complementary skill set to tackle the last-mile delivery challenges. In fact, co-founders Michael Sfictos, Ekin Burak Ozturk and Alex Theodoridis have strong product development, technical and operational backgrounds working with Fortune 500 companies, and a track record of being a co-founder of successfully exited startups. Senior team members also have product & growth experience in the startup world (e.g. Beat, Blueground).

We believe Ferto is well-positioned to leverage the existing logistic network taking local businesses beyond their 4 walls while transitioning from only brick-and-mortar to online.

We share the ambitious, product & technology-driven vision of Ferto as they build the last mile for the commerce of the future and are excited to welcome Ferto to Plug and Play’s family!