A startup called Wonder is now the new owner of Grubhub. The food delivery app has announced that it has accepted the contract early today.
Wonder bought Grubhub from Dutch food company Just Eat Takeaway for $650 million. Pending regulatory approval, the deal will close early next year. Wonder also announced that it has raised an additional $250 million in venture capital funding to “continue its mission and growth.”
Chicago software engineers Matt Maloney and Mike Evens founded Grubhub in 2004 as an online restaurant ordering service and an alternative to the paper menus that appear on doorsteps and junk mail. The company merged with Seamless, an automated food ordering and delivery company, in 2013. to $7.3 billion in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After the pandemic became a part of history and people started going out again, the number of restaurant delivery apps started to decrease. The legal troubles began in 2021 when Chicago sued Grubhub and some of its competitors over unfair business practices and payments. Companies like DoorDash eventually settled, but Grubhub’s legal battle with Chicago is still ongoing in court. .
In 2021, it won a similar lawsuit against Grubhub that resulted in a $3.5 million settlement. The following year, Grubhub announced from its corporate staff.
Wonder is a new food delivery company founded by Marc Lore, a former Walmart executive who owns two professional basketball teams. Lowe previously founded Diapers.com and Jet.com. Lore published a profile about her and her newest venture, Wonder, which she said “could be the Amazon of food and drink.”
Wonder’s initial focus was to “launch their own restaurants” and create a delivery service that offered “cheaper, faster construction.” Perhaps that’s because third-party food delivery services like Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber have seen their prices rise over the past few years. .
In New York alone, grocery delivery prices have risen 58 percent in less than a year . A new law that went into effect late last year raised the minimum wage for New York delivery drivers to $17.96 an hour. The New York City Department of Consumer and Labor Protection reported that wages for food delivery workers increased 64 percent in just eight months, while tips fell 60 percent.
