Picnic Raises €430M to Deepen Its German Footprint and Advance a Cross-Border Online Grocery Network

Courtesy: Picnic

Amsterdam-based online supermarket Picnic has secured €430 million from its existing investors, a significant injection of capital that the company will use to accelerate its expansion in Germany. The unicorn, already operationally profitable in the Netherlands, says most of the funding will go toward new regions, new cities, and the distribution infrastructure required to support them.

The announcement will be made later today at the 120th anniversary of the German-Dutch Chamber of Commerce in The Hague, where Dutch Economic Affairs Minister Vincent Karremans and German State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Energy Frank Wetzel are scheduled to attend. Picnic deliberately chose the event as the backdrop for the news, underscoring its view that the future of online grocery lies in tightly integrated, cross-border operations.

Germany sits at the center of that strategy. With a population five times larger than the Netherlands and nearly nine times the land area, scaling an online grocery service requires substantial investment simply to reach the same density and efficiency Picnic has built at home. The company says growth in Germany has been faster than its early trajectory in the Netherlands, reinforcing its decision to prioritize the market as its next major geographic pillar.

Picnic’s model, no-fee delivery, fixed delivery routes, and tightly orchestrated fulfillment, relies on physical infrastructure more than marketing to drive adoption. The new capital will support the build-out of additional distribution centers and the technology behind them, including the company’s expanding use of robotics and AI. Picnic already operates a robotic distribution center in Utrecht, and its facility in Oberhausen is now testing “robopicking” systems capable of handling more than 15,000 individual products. Items as different as eggs and olive oil each require their own handling logic, and the robots depend on visual AI trained to mimic human perception to determine how to lift and place them safely.

Michiel Muller, Picnic’s co-founder, says this technical progress is closely linked to the company’s cross-border structure. Teams in Germany and the Netherlands now operate as one unit, he notes, and that collaboration forms the foundation of Picnic’s long-term goal: building a unified European online grocery network rather than a series of siloed national operations.

Picnic’s origins help explain why this integration matters. Founded in 2015 by Muller, Frederik Nieuwenhuys, Joris Beckers, and Bas Verheijen, the company spent three years developing a system designed to remove every unnecessary step between warehouse and customer. A team of 30 engineers created the route-based model that remains core to Picnic today, giving customers predictable delivery windows while enabling the company to keep costs low enough to offer free delivery.

Since then, Picnic has grown to serve two million customers across two hundred cities in the Netherlands through seven distribution centers. It entered Germany in 2018 and France in 2021, extending its model into larger and more complex markets.

The new €430 million round signals that Picnic is preparing for a new phase, one defined by deeper expansion, heavier infrastructure investment, and the kind of technology backbone needed to compete for leadership in Europe’s online grocery sector. If the company succeeds, the next decade of digital grocery in Europe may shift from isolated national markets to something much closer to the seamless cross-border network Picnic is now building.