Same-Day Shopping App Curbside Picks Up $25 Million More
Palo Alto-based Curbside, a company offering a mobile app that allows shoppers to buy from local retailers like Target and Best Buy then pick up items at stores without exiting their car, is today announcing the close of $25 million in Series B funding.
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015, big-box retailers like Target and Best Buy wanted curbside pickup but lacked the consumer-facing software to run it — Curbside's $25 million Series B bankrolled exactly that layer, an app that let shoppers order from local stores and collect without leaving the car. The round sits early in an arc that ends with Rakuten acquiring Curbside outright in 2018, after which the pickup-and-delivery middleware space kept consolidating around its customers.
The follow-on coverage shows the pattern repeating on the retailer side: Target later moved to acquire the technology and assets of Deliv, another venture-funded same-day startup, rather than keep renting the capability.
First-order effects
- Curbside gains the capital to scale its retailer partnerships with chains like Target and Best Buy, giving those stores a working curbside-pickup app years before most built their own.
Second-order effects
- Competing same-day platforms respond by raising bigger strategic rounds of their own — Deliv's later $40M Series C drew Google and UPS as investors, signaling that logistics players wanted exposure to the same merchant-integration layer.
Third-order effects
- If the endgame holds — Curbside to Rakuten, Deliv's tech to Target — standalone pickup-and-delivery startups prove hard to sustain as independents, with their value ultimately absorbed by retailers and e-commerce acquirers who want the capability in-house.
The trend: Retail's last-mile pickup and delivery software keeps migrating from venture-backed intermediaries into the owned stacks of retailers and e-commerce giants through acquisition.