Deliveroo is a British online food delivery company founded by Greg Orlowski and Will Shu in 2013. Shu developed the platform in response to a lack of high-quality food delivery in London.
Deliveroo makes money by collecting 25-45% of every order it facilitates. It also charges delivery fees and onboarding fees for restaurants that wish to be featured on the platform.
Deliveroo for Business is a service designed for corporate clients needing to order food in bulk. The company also charges a higher commission to businesses that utilize a network of digital kitchens to process orders.
DoorDash is a platform business model that enables restaurants to set up at-no-cost delivery operations. At the same time, customers get their food at home, and dashers (delivery people) earn some extra money. DoorDash makes money by markup prices through delivery fees, memberships, and advertising for restaurants on the marketplace.
Glovo is a Spanish on-demand courier service that purchases and delivers products ordered through a mobile app. Founded in 2015 by Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud as a way to “uberize” local services. Glovo makes money via delivery fees, mini-supermarkets (fulfillment centers that Glovo operates in partnership with grocery store chains), and dark kitchens (enabling restaurants to increase their capacity).
Grubhub is an online and mobile platform for restaurant pick-up and delivery orders. In 2018 the company connected 95,000 takeout restaurants in over 1,700 U.S. cities and London. The Grubhub portfolio of brands like Seamless, LevelUp, Eat24, AllMenus, MenuPages, and Tapingo. The company makes money primarily by charging restaurants a pre-order commission, and it generates revenues when diners place an order on its platform. Also, it charges restaurants that use Grubhub delivery services when diners pay for them.
Lyft is a transportation-as-a-service marketplace allowing riders to find a driver for a ride. Lyft has also expanded with a multimodal platform that gives more options like bike-sharing or electric scooters. Lyft primarily makes money by collecting fees from drivers that complete rides on the platform.
OpenTable is an American online restaurant reservation system founded by Chuck Templeton. During the late 90s, it provided one of the first automated, real-time reservation systems. The company was acquired by Booking Holding back in 2014 for $2.6 billion. Today OpenTable makes money via subscription plans, referral fees, and in-dining with its first restaurant, as an experiment in Miami, Florida.
Postmates is a food delivery service built as a last-mile delivery service platform connecting locals with shops. Postmates makes money by collecting fees (commission, delivery, service, cart, and cancellation fees). It also makes money via its subscription service (called Unlimted – $9.99/month or $99.99 annually), giving free delivery on orders of more than $12.
Uber Eats is a three-sided marketplace connecting a driver, a restaurant owner, and a customer with Uber Eats platform at the center. The three-sided marketplace moves around three players: Restaurants pay commission on the orders to Uber Eats; Customers pay small delivery charges and, at times, cancellation fees; Drivers earn through making reliable deliveries on time.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
DoorDash Business Model →DoorDash Revenue →DoorDash generated $8.63 billion in revenue in 2023, compared to over $6.5 billion in revenue in 2022, and $4.8 billion in 2021.DoorDash Financials →DoorDash Employees →In December 2022, DoorDash announced the mass layoff of 1,250 employees, bringing the employees from 8,600 in 2021 to 7,350 at the end of 2022.DoorDash GOV →DoorDash defines its Marketplace GOV as the total dollar value of Marketplace orders completed in its local logistics platform, including taxes, tips, and any applicable Is Uber Eats Profitable? →If we look at EBITDA, Uber Eats was a profitable segment, generating $1.5 billion in EBITDA in 2023.Uber Eats Revenue →In 2023 Uber Eats generated $12.2 billion in revenue, compared to nearly $11 billion in 2022, $8.3 billion in revenue in 2021, and $3.9 billion in revenue in 2020.How Much Does Uber Eats Pay? →Uber Mobility, which is the core platform of Uber, had a 28.8% take rate in 2023, and a 19.15% take rate for the delivery platform (Uber Eats) in the same period.
