Area chart showing cumulative funding for two Colombian ghost kitchen startups, with RobinFood consistently having higher funding than Foodology | Sources: Crunchbase, Latinometrics

A ghost kitchen, or “virtual restaurant,” is a facility that enables anyone to prepare food and deliver it to customers via the Internet. According to Google Trends, the term gained traction in late 2018, when the controversial co-founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, invested $150M to gain control of CloudKitchens. One pandemic later, CloudKitchens is worth $15B.

The market is projected to reach $113B by 2027. This means there is room for more Unicorns to be born, and entrepreneurs in Bogotá, Colombia, have risen to the occasion.

This month, Foodology raised a flashy, Maluma-backed $50M funding round to continue its expansion across Latin America. The startup, founded by Daniela Izquierdo and Juan Azuero, now operates 80+ ghost kitchens in 20 cities in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru.

Healthy competition is beautiful — Foodology was launched a couple of years after its slightly better-funded rival, RobinFood. CEO Jose Guillermo Calderon claimed in 2020 that the company sought to scale from 50 to 1,000 stores by 2025. This would make it one of the largest chains in the region.

Is it close to 1,000? No; similarly to Foodology, RobinFood has 80+ locations in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico today. And competition is fierce outside both Colombian startups. CloudKitchens has been quietly yet aggressively expanding in Latin America, with now 70 kitchens in eight countries.

We try to stay neutral and not show support for one company over another. However, we're heavily on the side of local talent and would love to see both Bogota-born startups triumph over American competition in the LatAm market.