Thursday, May 23, 2019

"Food delivery app DoorDash raises $600M led by Darsana Capital Partners at a $12.6B valuation, just three months after it raised $400M at a $7B valuation"

To justify that kind of growth in valuation—80% per quarter; compounding out to 950% per annum—they are going to have to get their service mandated by government.

From Forbes:

DoorDash Is Now Worth $12.6 Billion After New $600 Million Investment
The investor feeding frenzy around food-delivery startups hasn’t stopped. Just three months after raising $400 million, DoorDash confirmed it has closed another $600 million with New York City hedge fund Darsana Capital Partners leading the round.
That’s an extra billion in its war chest so far this year, and half of the total of $2 billion raised for the San Francisco startup since its founding in 2013. The new funding round increases DoorDash's post-money valuation from $7 billion to $12.6 billion, according to cofounder and CEO Tony Xu. 

“This allows us to pull forward the future sooner,” Xu tells Forbes. “It’s helpful to raise capital, especially when the macroclimate seems to be a bit choppy.”

That external turbulence has shaken some of DoorDash’s competitors in what’s already a cutthroat market. Tensions around U.S. and China trade talks have put the markets in a precarious state, affecting stock in publicly traded Grubhub (2018 revenue: $1 billion). Postmates, which announced that it had confidentially filed to go public in February, still has not made its filings public or started an IPO roadshow. Uber’s public debut in early May was disappointing. Shares are trading below its initial pricing. But Xu isn’t shaken, even after seeing Uber or other consumer tech IPOs falter in the public markets. “The short answer is that it hasn’t had an impact on how we thought about our business or how we’ve thought about our future,” Xu says.

Investors clearly haven’t been spooked, either. Last week, Amazon announced it was leading a $575 million in London-based Deliveroo, bringing its total funding to $1.5 billion.
“Capital accrues to the winners in markets that people think are growing,” says Sequoia’s Alfred Lin, a board member whose firm has invested in every round since the Series A. “You don’t just get money because lots of money is in the system.”

Three years ago, it didn’t look like DoorDash would become the delivery darling. In 2016, DoorDash raised a down funding round, after investors lowered the share price. and a slew of other delivery startups failed in the months following. That’s changed, and now DoorDash’s market share has surpassed Postmates and Uber Eats in the U.S. (Uber Eats operates internationally and did $1.48 billion in revenue in 2018 globally.)...
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