Your Tech Story

food delivery

grubhub

GrubHub : One of the Top Ten Online Food Delivery Services Of United States

Leave a Comment / Founder / By

Be it a lazy Sunday or a tiring Tuesday, at times we don’t really wish to step out of our house for dinner. But who can stop the craving for good food? In those cases, the online food delivery services have become the real saviour.

GrubHub is one such online food delivery marketplace that has made the life of diners better and easier. Long before Zomato, Uber Eats or Foopanda stepped into the business of mobile food delivery; Grubhub was launched in the United States. It is one of the most famous and oldest online food delivery platforms that serve in the cities of the United States and London. The company was founded in 2004 by Matt Maloney and Mike Evans, with its headquarters based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Matt Maloney

Matt graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and did his MBA from the University of Chicago. He currently serves GrubHub as the CEO. Apart from his leadership in Grubhub, he is also an advisory board member in The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. He is also a member of ChicagoNEXT, an organization established to nurture the young entrepreneurs of Chicago.

GrubHub founders
Image Source: businessinsider.com

Mike Evans

Mike graduated from MIT and wrote the first version of GrubHub in 2004. After the company followed a very tempting growth trajectory with his and Maloney’s contributions, Evans left it to try something new. He also wrote a science fiction novel and launched a new company, Fixer in 2017.

History

After the launch of GrubHub in 2004, the co-founders won the first place for the business plan of GrubHub at the Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge in University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2006. This was the first victory of the company.

In 2007, the company raised a $1.1 million in the Series A funding led by Amicus Capital and Origin Ventures. This funding was used for expanding the business to San Francisco and New York markets. In 2009, another $2 million was raised in Series B funding which was led by Origin Ventures and Leo Capital. The funding received in Series C was five times the previous funding and was led by Benchmark Capital. In March 2011, the company raised $20 million in Series D funding hosted by DAG Ventures followed by raising another $50 million in Series E funding in the same year. The Series E funding was led by Lightspeed Ventures, and after this round of funding, the company acquired Dotmenu, the parent company of Campusfood and Allmenus. Both the funding and the acquisition made Grubhub’s position even stronger in the industry. In the same year, the company also acquired FanGo (a mobile ordering and payment solution provider).

In May 2013, Grubhub announced its merging with Seamless, its prime competitor in the market. The merged company planned to expand the business to more than 500 cities across the United States and take orders from more than 20,000 local restaurants. The signed agreement declared 58% of the share for Seamless and 42% for GrubHub. The agreement was finalized in August 2013.

In April 2014, the company went public for trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘GRUB’.

In 2015, the company acquired Delivered Dish followed by the acquisition of LAbite in May 2016. Both companies provided restaurant delivery services. In 2017, it took over Eat24, a food ordering platform from Yelp. A lot of acquisitions by Grubhub took place in the next few years, which includes LevelUp and Tapingo.

In February 2018, the company launched RestaurantHER, an initiative to support nationwide restaurants that are led by women and expanded its partnership with Foursquare. In April 2018, the company expanded its business further to 34 markets across the nation.

In May 2019, GrubHub came in partnership with Smoothie King, world’s leading smoothie brand.

Marketing Strategy

The biggest strength of Grubhub is collaboration. This helped GrubHub in expanding and escalating the growth. The company came in collaboration with the majority of the local restaurant outlets rather than in-house production of food, which cuts the labour cost and increases the profit. There are around 80,000 restaurants in alliance with GrubHub, which helps to maintain its stability in today’s market.

The increasing number of competitors is a potential threat that leads to market saturation irrespective of the growing number of customers. In order to eliminate its competitor from the market, GrubHub either came in partnership with these companies or acquired them.

The company also provided bonuses and special benefits to highly rated customers. This lures more users to order food through GrubHub.

The hassle-free delivery where the diner can track his or her valet and multiple payment options also attracts many users.

Statistics

Currently, there are 19.3 million active users who use GrubHub to make online food orders from 115,000 restaurants located in different cities of the United States and London. Around 521,000 orders are processed every day.

Zomato Successfully Tests Food Delivery Using Drones at 80kmph

News, Tech News / By

Drones are helping in almost every field, from aerial surveillance to the exploration of oils, gas, etc. And now, you can get your food delivered to your doorstep through a drone. Zomato has successfully tested delivering food using a hybrid drone, with a fusion of rotary wing and fixed wings. The drone covered a distance of 5 km in 10 minutes at a peak speed of 80 km per hour.

zomato
Image Source: techcircle.in

“The drone was tested last week at one of the remote sites approved by the DGCA. Such tests are done at very remote sites which are specially designed to conduct such tests,” said Zomato in a statement.

The company has not revealed the location where the drone-delivered the package, but it carried a payload of five kg.

Since the regulations do not allow such experiments and drones carrying payloads outside the visual line of sight, DGCA has asked the interested organisations, through a notification released on 13 May, to submit an Expression of Interest (EOI) to the DGCA for conducting experimental Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations (BVLOS) of drones. The regulations have said that the rules will be evolved for the companies that will bring new technologies.

Zomato, last year, acquired the drone delivery startup TechEagle Innovations in order to experiment with the food delivery through drones, such that to serve its customers better. The company has revealed that it is forming a consortium to carry out such practices and move forward with its new idea of deliveries through drones.

“While regulatory hurdles are not trivial, and the government’s concerns need to be looked at from various (valid) points of view, the tech is ready to fly and I am confident that drone delivery will be commonplace sooner rather than later,” said Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato.

The company is stepping towards deliveries through drones, to reduce the congestion on the roads and to provide faster deliveries to the customers. Though the average delivery time, the service takes to deliver food, is 30 minutes and with drones, the company wants to achieve lesser delivery time.

Tony Xu : The Co-founder of the Dashing Food Delivery Service ‘DoorDash’

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The food industry is blooming with every second that passes. Now that the food industry has got technology-induced in it, one can order any kind of food, anytime, anywhere. It requires nothing but a simple three taps on your tech-savvy devices. In this growing food industry, DoorDash emerges as a key company leading the change. Tony Xu, the founding CEO of the company shares a success story which speaks that a simple problem can turn on the light in our minds to figure out something innovative.

DoorDash Inc. is an on-demand food delivery service which was founded in 2013 by Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, Tony Xu and Evan Moore. The founding story of DoorDash, as described by Tony, is an ‘unlikely one’.

It was 2012, and all four of the founders were working on an app which focused on building the technology for small businesses. They used to go and talk to the owners of coffee shops and restaurants. It all started when they were in a small macaroon store, in Palo Alto. The manager of the store, Chloe, expressed all the problems in her day to day business. However, as they were about to leave, Chloe showed them a thick booklet, which contained pages of delivery orders, and said, “This drives me crazy. I have no drivers to fulfil them, and I’m the one doing all of it.”

Tony Xu
Image Source: Bloomberg

All four of them had their lightbulb moment. They spent the next few weeks interviewing and questioning other small businesses (nearly 200) and heard the same thing over and over again: ‘Deliveries are painful’. They started coding keeping in mind that they can improve this backlog and were ready with their first prototype within a few hours.

On January 12th, 2013, Palo Alto Delivery was born. The service spread so quickly that all the four members were delivering all over the Stanford campus. In the day, they were students and, in the night, they were delivery drivers. The name ‘Palo Alto Delivery’ was changed to DoorDash, in June 2013, and the delivery drivers were called the ‘Dashers’. “We learnt so much from driving in the streets. Now, anyone who joins the company, has to be a Dasher for at least 1 week,” said Xu.

“When we first started, we were trying to solve our own problems of getting food delivered. But soon, it grew quickly within the Stanford community and beyond. We found out that many families and office workers in the area have the same problem. When we deliver food, it’s as much about delivering happiness as it is about bringing convenience,” DoorDash posted on Medium.

Tony Xu, is a first-generation American. His first job was at his mom’s restaurant. His education includes B.S. (High Honours) in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from UC Berkeley, M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was an Arjay Miller Scholar at Stanford. He started his professional career at McKinsey and Company. After that, he worked in Product at Square and led special projects for CEO and CFO at eBay.

When he started DoorDash, his simple mission was to enable every merchant to deliver easily, and that mission has come a long way. DoorDash has drawn investments worth $700 million with key investors being: Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Kleiner Perkins Caufield, and Byers. During 2018, the company was valued at $1.4 billion in a round of funding.

In April 2018, DoorDash stepped into the grocery deliveries with a partnership with Walmart. Further, in the year, DoorDash surpassed Uber Eats to become the second largest company in US food delivery sales behind only GrubHub.

The company took everyone by surprise when its valuation took place in February 2019. The company’s value increased 5 times and valued $7 billion when the rounding was done by SoftBank, Vision Fund, DST Global and Y Combinator.

Tony Xu, has also kept the focus of the company on an issue very important to him personally. Project DASH was launched and has since focused on the efforts to save food from wastage.

“Today, more than four and a half years after we first launched the company, we’re still passionate about transforming local businesses helping them thrive in this digital and convenient economy.” Tony Xu, the founding CEO is leading his company with its dashing food delivery services to new heights and is setting an example in front of the world that if innovation stays, then progress to success will always be on the tracks.

Will Shu : The Co-Founder of the Multi-Million Delivery Empire

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Spotting a delivery boy, with his company’s branding food box, has become quite a common thing these days. But, a few years ago, these delivery services were limited to a few restaurants only. The saying ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ can’t be denied, if your late night craving leads you to launch a food delivery service very next day. Same happened with the founder of Deliveroo, Will Shu, who was working as an investment banker in London, and an idea to start a food delivery service clicked his mind, during one of his late night shifts.

Early Life

Will Shu aka William Shu, is a 38 years old American entrepreneur, who was born in 1979 in a Taiwanese household, in Connecticut, United States. He attended the Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor’s degree. After graduating in 2001, he started working at Morgan Stanley in New York as an investment banking analyst. After working for a few years, in 2010, he decided to return back to the US and completed a master’s degree in Business Administration from Wharton Business School.

After his MBA, he joined S.A.C. Capital Advisors as an analyst. In 2012, he started working as an investment banker at the London branch of Morgan Stanley.

Founding Deliveroo

While working for Morgan Stanley in London, Will Shu faced difficulty with arranging food at mid-nights at his office. An idea of starting a delivery service hit his mind and discussed the same with his childhood friend and software engineer, Greg Orlowski. The idea looked fine, and Will contacted his landlord who also owned a cafe. His landlord became his first client and ultimately, Shu became the company’s first delivery boy.

Will Shu
Image Source: whartonmagazine.com

The restaurants like Pizza Hut were already delivering food to their clients, but, Deliveroo became a delivery service that helped all size’s restaurants to deliver food to their customers through a single delivery service.

In the beginning, partnering with his landlord’s cafe, Will delivered food in the surrounding area, to understand the business on both the sides; the restaurant and the customer. Slowly, he reached more restaurant owners and managed to sign a contract with them. According to the contract, he would deliver the food to the customers that will cost a small amount to the restaurant. He worked, as a delivery boy, alone for 9 months and his delivery service became famous, receiving really good feedback from the customers. After nine months, he started hiring more employees for the company. By 2014, the service expanded to other cities of London and in 2015, Deliveroo reached Paris, Berlin and Dublin.

In 2017, the company’s worth was estimated to be around £1.5 billion, and it had expanded to 12 countries and was working in more than 150 cities. Deliveroo helped many independent restaurants to reach more customers, in the neighbouring localities. These small, independent restaurants, have always been the main focus of the business plan of Deliveroo. Will intends to build a separate kitchen for the delivery operations for those independent restaurants.

Personal Life

Will holds the American nationality and lives in Notting Hill, London. He still continues to deliver food once in two weeks for Deliveroo.

UberEATS enters India with a promise to deliver food within 35 minutes

News, Tech News / By

Uber, the taxi hailing app that also runs food delivery service named UberEATS in countries like Australia, UK, US etc. has launched UberEATS in India. Starting its business in the year 2014 in Los Angeles, UberEATS dominates food delivery space in 26 countries across the world and has a presence in total 78 cities, now including Mumbai as well. Uber has finally launched its food delivery app UberEATS in India starting with Mumbai city. They also announced their plans to expand further to six other major cities in India before the year ends.

Bhavik Rathore, appointed as the Head of UberEATS operations in India, said “Mumbai is home to a booming food industry with a vibrant food culture offering both global and local cuisines. The introduction of UberEats in India, with Mumbai as the first city, is a major step in our global expansion and showcases our commitment to the region”. With an experience of delivering food in 78 countries, the team claims to provide cultural food-variety delivered to doorsteps in just 35 minutes!

That’s all good, but one thing that UberEATS has to keep in mind is- they are not getting a clean slate to start with. Apps like Swiggy, Zomato, Just eat, Foodpanda and many more already have a rich customer base in Mumbai. The new entrant has to fight for its piece of cake. To this Kartik said “While Swiggy and Zomato currently have a strong presence in the market, they have, in effect, cleared the way for Uber by helping build a market that didn’t exist earlier.”

UberEATS brings along some unique features to the game as well. The app is going to provide food suggestions according to your location in the city, which means, interface will be different for every person. Suggestions will depend on availability of associated restaurants around your current location when you open your app. As of now, the brand has already signed deals with more than 200 restaurants including The Bohri Kitchen, Le15, Freahmenu and Chaayos. UberEATS is also interlinked with Uber ride app to provide seamless food delivery if you chose to order something during the ride.

India is evolving, and so does the opportunity to earn more in Indian market. Scaling to India is in every global firm’s checklist (except few like Snapchat). With a population of 20 million and being the third business hub in India, Mumbai becomes the target place to get started. And we hope, UberEATS does well in India utilizing the data from Uber ride and their three years of experience worldwide.