Six months after being acquired by Square, food delivery service Caviar launches Android app, has tripled orders, more than doubled headcount
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece captures the growth phase of Square's Caviar bet: six months post-acquisition, orders have tripled, headcount has more than doubled, and an Android app finally closes the platform gap against iOS-only rivals. At the time it read as validation of Square folding delivery into its merchant stack.
The longer arc is messier: despite this momentum, Square reportedly shopped Caviar to Uber, GrubHub, and Yelp in late 2015–early 2016 and saw its proposed $100M price rebuffed, then kept building — buying OrderAhead's takeout assets two years later — before ultimately exiting via DoorDash's $410M cash-and-stock acquisition of the business.
First-order effects
- Caviar's Android launch immediately widens its addressable order base beyond iPhone users, while the tripled order volume forces continued hiring just to keep courier and restaurant operations staffed.
- Square gains a faster-growing consumer-facing product inside its portfolio, one whose order flow ties directly back to its core payments relationship with restaurants.
Second-order effects
- Rival delivery services competing for the same urban restaurants now face a Square-backed Caviar that can bundle delivery with payments processing rather than win on couriers alone.
- Sustained headcount growth raises Caviar's cost base ahead of revenue scale, which is precisely the economics that later pushed Square to seek buyers instead of funding indefinite expansion.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, food delivery consolidates around scaled platforms able to absorb sub-scale players — Caviar's journey from rebuffed $100M offers to a $410M exit shows how quickly valuations re-rated once DoorDash-class consolidators entered.
- For payments companies, the episode is a structural lesson: owning demand-side logistics proved outside Square's center of gravity, pushing acquirers toward asset-light takeout ordering (OrderAhead) over full delivery fleets.
The trend: Food delivery is consolidating from independent regional services into vertically integrated platforms, with payments companies like Square acting as temporary owners before handing assets to dedicated logistics players.