U.K.-based premium food delivery service Deliveroo (Roofoods Ltd.) has raised $70 million Series C in a round led Greenoaks Capital and Index Ventures that included previous investors Accel Partners and Hoxton Ventures.

Founded in 2012, Deliveroo pitches itself as a technology company that is focused on marketing, selling and delivering restaurant meals to the household or office.

The company says their technology platform optimizes food ordering and delivery by integrating web and mobile consumers with restaurant tablet-based point-of-sale order management terminals and their logistics optimization algorithm via their delivery driver smartphone software.

The short, and far more understandable version is, like others in the space, it organizes food deliveries, although it does differentiate itself by focusing on premium foods versus competitors, and it also does the deliveries using its own drivers, allowing them to facilitate food orders from restaurants that don’t offer their own delivery services, not uncommon with higher end establishments.

Deliveroo has been expanding and now has operations outside the United Kingdom in cities including Paris, Berlin, and Dublin.

“We’ve made significant traction in the markets that we’ve entered; people really want great food delivered quickly to them,” Deliveroo Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer William Shu told TechCrunch. “And because of that we’ve elected to open ourselves up for investment and really accelerate the growth in many developed economies, and that includes a lot of the cities in Western Europe, Southern Europe and Central Europe, as well as the Gulf states and Asia.”

They’re keen

Food delivery services are a crowded market with plenty of competition and in Deliveroo’s case, bigger competitors.

The question becomes though is there a strong enough niche market for a premium food service delivery site, or should we even be considering it as a food delivery site as Deiveroo actually does the deliveries itself, making it more akin to a logistics company than a traditional food delivery site such as those provided by competitors EatNow, Foodpanda and others.

Deliveroo also has ambitions to expand into the Middle East and Asia, worthy expansion targets, but likewise the question there becomes can those markets sustain upmarket food deliveries given that in a country like Thailand, food delivery is already often fairly expensive compared to eating out, and the prevalence of places to eat out is such that most don’t have to walk far to do so.

Including the new round Deliveroo has raised $99.6 million to-date.

Along with an expansion into new territories, the company said it would use the new funds to increase headcount and to further its marketing activities.

Image credit: 34316967@N04/Flickr/CC by 2.0