Food delivery service Delivery Hero raises $350M

Delivery Hero has now raised $523 million in three rounds in 2014 alone

(Updated with comment from Delivery Hero)

Food delivery company Delivery Hero is having something of a banner year, having now raised three big rounds of funding in just the last nine months.

The company announced on Wednesday that it has raised approximately $350 million in new funding. The round was led by existing investors, including Insight Venture Partners, Kite Ventures and a new investor, Vostok Nafta.

Delivery Hero has now raised a total of $523 million this year in three rounds. First it raised $88 million from Insight Venture Partners in January, followed by another $85 million in a Series F round that was led by Luxor Capital Group in April.

In total, Delivery Hero has now raised over $635 million since its founding in 2010. The company is now valued at roughly $1 billion. Given the amount of money it is raising, and how quickly, its not surpising that a potential public offering might not be very far off.

"We aim to be IPO ready in the course of next year, with IPO as an option to choose from," a Delivery Hero spokesperson told me.

The company says it will primarily use the new money in order to invest in its existing markets, specifically the United Kingdom and Germany. Delivery currently provides ordering capability for more than 75,000 restaurants in 23 countries across five continents, including Sweden, Korea, China and India.

The service is currently used by over 6 million customers, and the company has previously revealed that it doubled its revenue in 2013, making it profitable for the first time in its history.

Delivery Hero’s restaurant partners generate more than one billion dollars in annual sales, and deliver more than 10 million meals every month.

The food delivery space

There has been a lot of action in the food delivery space this year.

In addition to all the money raised by Delivery Hero, others that have raised funding include SpoonRocket, which offers unique, curated food, with a daily changing menu, raised $11 million in May. FoodPanda raised $60 million two weeks ago. 

This year has also seen Square get in on the action, first with the launch of Square Order in May, an app that allows users to order food in advance from cafes and restaurants and then pick them up without having to wait in line. Last week the company purchased Caviar, a company that works with local restaurants that would, typically, not feature a delivery service.

Uber also revealed late last month that it would begin testing out a food delivery service of its own in Santa Monica.

But the biggest news in the food delivery sector over the past year or so has to have come from Grubhub. First, the company combined with one of its biggest competitors, Seamless, creating a super delivery company.Then GrubHub announced that it would be going public. Its April IPO raised nearly $200 million. The company is currently trading at $38.37 a share, more than $10 above its IPO price.

VatorNews has reached out to Delivery Hero for more information. We will update this story if we learn more.

(Image source: deliveryhero.com)