Nilus operates a food tech company focused on eradicating food insecurity by streamlining inefficiencies in the supply chain. The company's services includes creating a marketplace and logistical tools to manage offerings and distributing healthy food at discounted prices to low-income communities, enabling low-income groups to have access to healthy food markets at affordable prices.
HQ Location & Year Founded: Buenos Aires, 2017
Founder: Ady Beitler, Co-founder and CEO, is a lawyer-turned-social entrepreneur, who prior to founding Nilus, spent nearly nine years as Project Manager with Inter-American Development Bank. While there, he supported the reconstruction efforts in Haiti following the devastating earthquake in 2010. A native of Uruguay, Ady holds a law degree from the University of Montevideo and a Master’s degree from Harvard Law School.
Funds Raised and VC Investors: $6 million from Angel Ventures, Globivest, GV, Kalei Ventures, Myelin VC, Newtopia VC, Parallel18, Plug & Play Tech Center, Preface Ventures, and angel investors like Manu Ginobili and Matias Woloski, among others.
Where did the idea for Nilus originate?
I have been committed to social justice and humanitarian work for a long time. I spent three years in Haiti helping people to rebuild after the 2010 earthquake. While there, at one point, I was sent across the island to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. I noticed that groceries there were much cheaper than in Port-au-Prince, where people are far poorer than in the Punta Cana resort area. Despite being situated on the same island, it was astonishing to see that the population with less financial means had to pay more for necessities than in wealthier areas. It sparked a thought in my head about how to overcome this market failure and I turned my attention to food deserts, meaning areas that are underserved by large supermarkets that can keep prices down due to scale and logistical advantages.
What is the key problem that Nilus intends to solve?
Food insecurity affects over 2 billion people worldwide, whereby food deserts result in people having fewer food options and at a higher cost than in more developed parts of the world. This problem does not just impact developing countries. In the US, the gap in prices can be as high as 50% between food deserts and more affluent areas. Because of lack of distribution and volume, small grocery vendors often buy supplies at stores such as Costco and then mark them up to earn a margin. I decided to build a company that would try to solve this problem through the power of community, high volume grocery buying and distribution. I wanted to create technology to make this viable and efficient, starting in Latin America. The concept of group purchases has already been established in China and has led to the creation of three “unicorn” companies that are taking on this challenge. I wanted to apply this to the slums of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and all of Latin America to see if we could help these communities.
How are you most differentiated as a service?
We go straight to where we can have the most impact through people and technology. We offer opportunities to community leaders, who are largely stay-at-home moms looking for both supplemental income and the opportunity to make a difference within their communities. By accessing wholesale prices through volume and leveraging centralized distribution hubs, we can pass along savings of 25-30% to consumers on groceries and necessities. This also gives large brands such as Nestle and the opportunity to reach deeper into markets that they can’t always penetrate as well as they would like to.
What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?
We operate currently in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, where we serve 75,000 consumers including the direct customers and their families. We have 600 active community leaders and are currently generating around $3 million on an annual run rate basis. We operate both a direct-to-consumer business as well as “social gastronomy” customers, which include cafeterias, restaurants, hospitals and schools. The business is growing by more than 10% every month.
What lies ahead in the plans for Nilus?
We believe that we have just scratched the surface in our first two markets. We will continue to focus on improving our business model and distribution through streamlined operations and greater volume. We think this business can scale quickly across Mexico and we are looking toward our next country of Brazil, which has enormous potential. Furthermore, we plan to test in the US, which also has huge disparities in food distribution, starting with the Miami market.
Ron’s Take
For those of us who are privileged enough to live in communities that have abundant supermarkets and grocery supply chains built, the issue of food deserts is largely off the radar. For the two billion-plus people in the world who do not have such a luxury, it is a part of daily life to deal with limited stock, variety and having to pay a significant premium to obtain basic necessities for life. The concept of collective food buying to benefit these communities really was popularized in China. However, the scale of the problem transcends both industrialized as well as developing nations and communities. The consequence of not solving this is having large communities that are stuck in a vicious cycle of inequality. Pioneering social entrepreneurs like Ady Beitler and his team are showing that mighty challenges can have simple solutions, but require the will and operational capabilities, not to mention the financial backing, to tackle such issues.