JCU Strategic Management Class Welcomes Filippo Chiricozzi, Founder of Moovenda

On Thursday November 17, Prof. Pulino‘s Strategic Management class was joined by Filippo Chiricozzi, COO & founder of Moovenda.

Filippo Chiricozzi

Chiricozzi, 27, earned a master’s degree in International Economics at La Sapienza in 2014. His thesis on the automobile market won him the first prize at UNRAE. He started his career well before graduation, at 16, with Eutopia, an association for social promotion. He built expertise in marketing and logistics working as a junior sales manager at YourPersonalJames in 2013; as founder of M4U, a Marketing Association for Universities, in 2013; and as an intern at WineOWine in 2014.

In November 2014 he took part in Startup Weekend Roma, winning the first prize with Moovenda, a community-based generic delivery service across Rome, which only later focused on food, as the result of a crucial “pivot”. This was around Easter and they started delivering Easter eggs: it was a success. Moovenda soon signed partnerships with many restaurants, and now collaborates with more than 350 all around Rome.

“The core part of our business are the Moovers, our drivers,” Chiricozzi explained. “They use mostly bikes and motorbikes, not cars.”

Moovenda has three types of customers: the restaurants, the people who order the food, and the drivers who make the delivery possible. In their business model, clients pay a small fee based on distance, which helps defray the cost of the drivers, while restaurants pay 30% of the bill to Moovenda. At the heart of their success is their logistics and optimization algorithm “Brian”, which enables them to cover the whole city, unlike other competitors that have a much shorter range.

Moovenda has grown to a team of 12, plus more than 80 Moovers. Among their advisors are former CEOs of Groupon Europe and Groupon South Africa.

Chiricozzi talked about the risk he took when he decided to turn the business around and start working with restaurants. “Was it risky? Too much. Especially the decision to rebuild everything from scratch. But we found the proper solution. Great things never come from comfort zones.”