There have been a handful of watershed moments in the third-party delivery space these last few years: Grubhub going public in 2014, Target buying Shipt in 2017 and DoorDash raising three-quarters of a billion dollars during 2018. With the latest news that DoorDash raised an additional $400 million, the industry crosses another mega-checkpoint with investors valuing the San Francisco-based delivery service at $7.1 billion dollars.
The two big questions from this investment, which nearly doubled DoorDash’s valuation in just seven months, are whether this eye-watering market value has any connection to reality and, secondly, what impacts this will have on the wider on-demand landscape as Postmates prepares to join Grubhub on the public markets.