In a matter of five hours, delivery firm DoorDash announced two multibillion-dollar acquisitions that stand to turn what is already the largest food-delivery service in the U.S. into a formidable global player. It agreed to buy London-based delivery Deliveroo Plc for 180 pence per share, or about £2.9 billion ($3.9 billion), and it’s acquiring Manhattan-based hospitality tech company SevenRooms for $1.2 billion.
Alongside the deals, DoorDash also issued a strong orders outlook for the current quarter and posted better-than-expected gross order value for the first three months of the year in a statement on Tuesday.
DoorDash’s acquisition of SevenRooms will give it a reservation platform and customer-management tool similar to OpenTable or Resy that works with more than 13,000 restaurant groups. SevenRooms’ clients include Marriott International Inc., MGM Resorts International and Wolfgang Puck.
In 2022 DoorDash worked with SevenRooms to pilot restaurant reservations within the DoorDash app in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In addition to restaurant delivery, DoorDash also offers white-label services to build ordering interfaces for restaurants’ websites and phone answering systems.
Chief Executive Officer Tony Xu said DoorDash’s philosophy on deals hasn’t changed. “The bar continues to remain high for M&A,” he said in a call with analysts on Tuesday. “Sometimes, the timing of some of these announcements aren’t or can’t be perfectly forecasted. But what I would say is it really is business as usual.”
The Deliveroo deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, while the all-cash SevenRooms purchase is expected to close in the second half of this year. Both transactions will require regulatory approvals, and in the case of Deliveroo, at least 75% of the company’s shareholders will need to give their blessing. So far, investors representing 15.4% of Deliveroo’s stock have agreed to sell their shares, including Chief Executive Officer Will Shu.
The company’s buying spree highlights DoorDash’s ambitions outside of the U.S., where it already commands about two-thirds of the food-delivery market. A takeover of Deliveroo will expand its reach to more than 40 countries, DoorDash said. The two companies combined had a gross order value of about $90 billion last year and have 50 million monthly active users.
The delivery industry has been consolidating after a slowdown from pandemic-level highs, leaving room for a dominant player like DoorDash to grow even larger.
DoorDash shares dropped 9.8% to $185.35 at 10:10 a.m. in New York, the biggest intraday decline in a year. The stock has gained 11% this year.
