Delivery Hero will acquire a ~39.4% majority stake in Spanish delivery app Glovo, valuing Glovo at €2.3B
Sabahatjahan Contractor / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
Delivery Hero has been assembling Glovo piece by piece: in 2020 it bought Glovo's Latin American operations across eight countries for ~$272M, and before that Glovo had scaled on venture rounds from a €30M Series B led by Rakuten Capital to a €450M Series F in 2021. Now Delivery Hero is taking a ~39.4% majority stake at a €2.3B valuation — roughly a sevenfold jump from the €300M+ implied by its 2018 Series C.
The move lands while Delivery Hero is retrenching: founder Niklas Östberg is set to step down as CEO by March 2027, activist investors are applying pressure, and the group is shedding units across more than 70 countries to concentrate on the Middle East and Asia.
First-order effects
- Delivery Hero takes control of Glovo's remaining business beyond the LatAm arm it already owns, folding Spain's largest homegrown delivery app into a portfolio being pruned toward core regions.
- Glovo's earlier backers — including the lead investors from its €450M Series F — get an exit path into a consolidated owner rather than waiting for an independent listing.
Second-order effects
- Glovo's planned shift to employing roughly 15,000 riders in Spain, with an anticipated €100M earnings hit in 2025, now sits on Delivery Hero's balance sheet — turning a labor-model compliance cost into a group-level line item.
- Rival delivery platforms operating in Spain face a Glovo backed by one of the sector's largest consolidators just as its labor costs rise, squeezing margins for anyone still running contractor-based models in the market.
Third-order effects
- If activist-driven discipline keeps pushing Delivery Hero to concentrate capital, European food delivery consolidates further around a handful of platform owners, with national champions like Glovo surviving as subsidiaries rather than independents.
- The combination of ownership consolidation and Spain's rider-employment requirements previews a sector where labor regulation, not customer acquisition, becomes the main determinant of which operators can afford to stay in each market.
The trend: Global food delivery is rolling up into a few consolidated platforms, with labor-law compliance costs increasingly absorbed by large owners instead of venture-funded startups.