Many rapid delivery startups, which surged during the pandemic, have either retreated or shut down after struggling to make the economics work
Companies that promise groceries delivered in 15 minutes surged during the pandemic—but are now in retreat. — It took only eight months for Jokr … Tweets: @carnage4life Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Investors poured $8B into 15-minute food delivery startups when it's now clear that big players like Uber & DoorDash are actually terrible businesses. It's a great example of how VCs are actually terrible at their jobs and the industry's ripe for change. https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The 15-minute grocery race was the pandemic's most capital-dense consumer bet: six startups fighting for New York City alone had raised $5.5B+ since 2020, with sources telling the WSJ some were losing $20+ per order, while European rivals promising 10-minute delivery had pulled in $1.56B in 2021 on their own. This piece marks the turn — Jokr went from unicorn to retreating within months, and investors like Dare Obasanjo now tally roughly $8B poured into the category.
What makes the story more than a single company's stumble is the follow-through: by October, the FT counted fewer than half of the US and European rapid delivery startups launched during the pandemic still operating, squeezed by huge losses and a funding drought.
First-order effects
- Jokr, Getir, Buyk and their peers are pulling out of cities or shutting down entirely, ending the freebie-heavy land grab they used to build New York customer bases.
- The roughly $8B investors committed to 15-minute delivery is being written down as startups that cannot cover per-order costs lose access to new rounds.
Second-order effects
- Consolidation pressure falls on survivors like Getir, which can absorb retreated rivals' markets only if it fixes the same loss-making economics — scale alone no longer reads as a moat to funders.
- Incumbents Uber and DoorDash, which Obasanjo argues were already weak businesses, face less subsidized competition at the quick-commerce edge but also a chastened VC class less willing to bankroll delivery subsidies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ultrafast delivery settles into a few scaled operators running sustainable margins rather than a dozen venture-subsidized players, with dark-store networks consolidated rather than duplicated city by city.
- The category becomes a case study in the post-2022 capital cycle: growth-at-all-costs consumer bets losing funding access when unit economics stay negative, pushing VCs toward capital-efficient models.
The trend: Pandemic-era rapid delivery is collapsing from a VC-funded land grab into a consolidated few, as the 2022 funding drought forces the industry to price per-order economics over growth.