Voly creditors take bailout as subscription butcher Our Cow swoops

The failed grocery delivery company has sold its assets to a subscription butcher service, with creditors accepting they’ll lose most of their investments.

Voly’s assets and customer database have been picked up by subscription butcher service Our Cow.

Creditors of failed grocery delivery start-up Voly have agreed to a deal to be repaid between 15c and 27c in the dollar, as the company’s assets and customer database have been picked up by subscription butcher service Our Cow.

On Monday, a deal proposed by Voly co-founders Mark Heath and Thibault Henry came into effect in which creditors – owed $17.7m – will lose most of their investments but be partially repaid over a three-to-six month period.

Hall Chadwick administrators Richard Albarran and John Vouris had found that Voly may have been trading while insolvent for more than a year, and burned through more than $13m in cash in just 12 months before it collapsed in November.

Voly, the trading name of Milko Grocery Ltd, offered 15-minute grocery delivery and had around 80,000 users across Sydney. The start-up terminated all of its 112 employees in November.

Our Cow, a direct-to-consumer beef business led by Casino-based farmers Bianca Tarrant and Dave McGiveron, has acquired Voly’s customer database, app and brand assets for an undisclosed sum in a bid to woo capital city customers. Ms Tarrant and Mr McGiveron began selling their beef via subscription in April 2021, after nearly losing their farm to droughts and bushfires. The company now employs 40 people and turns over around $20m annually.

“We heard of Voly going into administration before Christmas and decided to explore the opportunity,” Ms Tarrant said in an interview. “Voly had done a great job building a good brand and a great database, we thought it would be good opportunity to introduce their customers to Our Cow. We want to introduce the Voly customers to Our Cow and our product range.”

Our Cow is launching expressions of interest next week for a $2.5m capital raise through crowd-funding platform Birchal.

Our Cow co-founder Bianca Tarrant.

“We want to continue growing the brand and bringing on more farmers to the Our Cow program, we’re planning to introduce seafood very soon and a few other products and also work on our delivery times,” Ms Tarrant said. “It became a tough (economic) environment and high inflation may have made it difficult for Voly.”

The moves cap a rapid fall for Voly, which launched in 2021 and whose pitch was to shake up the grocery industry by delivering orders within 15 minutes and doing away with the need for consumers to carry out a weekly shop. The start-up, which had raised $18m in seed funding from venture capital outfits including Sequoia Capital India and the Australia-based Artesian Capital, entered administration on November 21, with its founders blaming high inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for its demise. “The sudden changes in macro environment, unstable geopolitics and high inflation have made it extremely difficult to attract new capital despite the support of our current investors,” co-founder Thibault Henry said in a LinkedIn post.

Milkrun founder and CEO Dany Milham.

Sydney-based Milkrun is the last remaining local company of its kind. In June, it ditched its promise of 10-minute deliveries.

The start-up has been backed by Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, and in 2022 raised $75m in capital from venture capital funds including Tiger Global Management and AirTree Ventures.