Takeout Giant Delivery Hero Raises Another $110M At Over $3.1B Valuation Ahead Of IPO
Delivery Hero, the takeout food ordering service based out of Berlin, has raised yet more money — possibly some of its last before an IPO sometime after 2015. It's picked up another $110 million from two unnamed …
Context & Ripple Effects
This $110M round closes a two-year arc: a month earlier Delivery Hero paid a record $589M for Turkey's Yemeksepeti, buying geographic scale before facing public-market scrutiny. The raise at over $3.1B was widely read as a final private step before a listing.
That read proved right. Two years on, sources pointed to a Frankfurt IPO at about $4.5B, the company formally announced a $500M+ offering alongside Q1'17 revenue of $136M, up 68% YoY, and it ultimately rose 9% on its first day of trading in Frankfurt after raising about €1B.
First-order effects
- Delivery Hero's existing backers gain liquidity optionality: at over $3.1B, the round prices the company for a listing rather than another growth phase, and the new unnamed investors are effectively underwriting the IPO path.
- Rival takeout platforms now face a competitor freshly capitalized to keep acquiring national leaders, following the Yemeksepati template of buying market share outright instead of building it.
Second-order effects
- Food-delivery M&A gets more expensive: every regional leader Delivery Hero doesn't buy becomes an asset its competitors must bid up, pushing consolidation deals toward record prices like the one set by Yemeksepeti.
- European exchanges compete for the listing: the choice of Frankfurt over other venues sets a precedent for which market captures large Berlin-built consumer internet companies and their trading volume.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, food delivery consolidates into a handful of multi-country platforms funded through late private rounds and exited via large European IPOs, leaving local operators as acquisition targets rather than long-term independents.
- A successful Frankfurt debut would give Berlin's startup ecosystem its template for scaling consumer marketplaces to public-company size, encouraging later founders to plan for European listings rather than US exits.
The trend: European consumer internet companies are using late-stage mega-rounds to fund cross-border roll-ups, then exiting through large domestic exchange IPOs rather than US listings.