Industry Online food ordering Website www.deliveryhero.com Headquarters Berlin | Area served Worldwide Founded 2011 Number of employees 3,000 | |
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Products food and beverages for delivery or pick up Subsidiaries Foodora, Yemeksepeti, PedidosYa, SLM Finland Oy Founders Lukasz Gadowski, Kolja Hebenstreit, Claude Ritter, Niklas Östberg, Markus Fuhrmann Profiles | ||
Delivery Hero is an online food-delivery service based in Berlin, Germany. The company operates in 53 countries internationally in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and partners with 300,000 restaurants.
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Delivery Hero users can find local restaurants, filter by cuisine, browse menus, read reviews and other information like the restaurant operating times and order takeaway food online. Payments can be made by credit card, PayPal or with cash on delivery. Delivery Hero services are also accessible via mobile app (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry).
History
Delivery Hero Holding was founded by Niklas Östberg, Kolja Hebenstreit, Markus Fuhrmann and Lukasz Gadowski in May 2011, with the goal of turning Delivery Hero into a global online food ordering platform. Under the leadership of Niklas Östberg and Fabian Siegel, Delivery Hero first expanded to Australia, Russia and Mexico in 2011. In early 2012 the enterprise acquired Lieferheld in Germany and hungryhouse.co.uk in the UK.
Delivery Hero then raised €25 million in new funding to finance acquisitions in four European countries: Sweden, Finland, Austria and Poland. In August 2012 Delivery Hero started expanding in both South Korea and China through YoGiYo and Aimifan and the Asian expansion continued in 2013 when Delivery Hero increased investment in TastyKhana following a successful cooperation period.
In 2012 and 2013, the harsh competition between the various delivery service online portals led the German press to dub the events as cyberwar between the big web-portals. There were reports of frequent Denial-of-service attack attacks against each portal, accusations of data-stealing as well as numerous lawsuits of the portals against each other. Delivery Hero was one of the more aggressive actors, and in 2012, the Delivery Hero office in Berlin was raided by police and the prosecution pressed charged against the Delivery Hero management. Delivery Hero was prosecuted for perpetrating DoS attacks against its competitors and stealing data from the other web services.
In 2014 Delivery Hero acquired a controlling stake in Latin American market leader PedidosYa and in August 2014 the group acquired German market leader and rival, pizza.de.
According to TNW Tech5 2014, Delivery Hero was one of Germany’s top 3 fastest growing start ups. Delivery Hero today is one of the world’s largest online food ordering network with over 300,000 global restaurant partners more than 5,000 staff in 53 countries worldwide. Delivery Hero is the largest online food ordering network service in Germany and among the largest worldwide.
In April 2015, Delivery Hero acquired South Korean delivery service Baedaltong, one of the chief competitors of its own YoGiYo service. One month later Delivery Hero bought the Turkish competitor Yemeksepeti for 530 million Euro, which was the largest acquisition in this business sector to date. In October 2015 Delivery Hero also acquired Munich-based food delivery service Foodora from Rocket Internet.
Investment
In November 2011, Delivery Hero received its first investment funding. In this financing round Team Europe, Holtzbrinck Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures, Kite Ventures and ru-Net together invested €4 million. The second funding round took place in April 2012. This time the existing investors raised their investments by €25 million to support the international growth of the enterprise. In August 2012 Delivery Hero received an additional €40 million funded primarily by Kite Ventures and Kreos Capital. A Series D financing round saw Delivery Hero receive $30 million from Phenomen Ventures In the latest Series D financing round.
In January 2014 Delivery Hero announced a Series E financing of $88 million led by Insight Venture Partners. A further $85m followed in April 2014 and was used to strengthen Delivery Hero’s presence in core markets.
In September 2014 a further $350m of investment was secured from existing partners and Swedish fund Vostok Nafta. This was the largest investment in a European start up since 2009. In December 2014 the company raised another €287 Million from Rocket Internet. The total investment size by Rocket Internet was €496 Million in primary and secondary for a 30% stake in Delivery Hero. Three months later Rocket Internet increased its stake in Delivery Hero to 39%.
CEO Niklas Östberg announced in January 2017, that he wants his company to be ready for an IPO in the second quarter of that year. In the months to come, Delivery Hero will focus on the integration of the recently acquired competitor Foodpanda. According to manager magazin, he is aiming at a valuation of about 3.5 billion Euros.
Competitors
Delivery Hero's main competitors are Just Eat, GrubHub, Takeaway.com and Deliveroo. On 10 December 2016 it acquired its major competitor Foodpanda. The company is estimated at a $3 billion valuation.
In Germany, Delivery Hero is suffering from fierce competition of "Lieferando", a brand of the Dutch company Takeaway.com. Delivery Hero's "Lieferheld" and "Pizza.de" services have a joint market leadership in the country but recently lost ground to Lieferando, which is growing faster thanks to higher investments in marketing. When Lieferando was still an independent company, both Takeaway and Delivery Hero wanted to buy it. The founders decided in the last minute to go with Takeaway in 2014.