Take-Out Wars Heat Up: Delivery Hero Raises Further $50M To Race Just-Eat To Global Domination

Delivery Hero, the online take-out ordering service founded by startup factory Team Europe, has raised a hefty $50 million Series D led by Kite Ventures, a previous backer of the company, while Kreos Capital also joins this latest round.

This brings Delivery Hero’s total funding to approximately $100m and comes hot on the heels of its biggest rival, Just-Eat, raising an additional $64 million from Vitruvian Partners, Index Ventures, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, bringing its total funding to a whopping $129.4m. It seems that the war of the take-outs is well and truly underway.

Both companies appear to be following a similar strategy to be a global player and to scale aggressively as the appetite for convenience food coupled with the convenience of online ordering doesn’t seem to be fading.

Delivery Hero claims a network of 22,000 restaurants and operates in 11 countries: Germany, UK, Australia, Sweden, Finland, Korea, Russia, Poland, Austria, Switzerland and Mexico.

Meanwhile, Just-Eat operates in 13 countries, which it says makes it the “world’s biggest takeaway e-commerce provider” — so make of that what you will.

Specifically, Berlin-headquartered Delivery Hero says it will use the new funds to fuel growth and that this will include acquisitions — a continuation of its existing strategy.

In a canned statement, Lukasz Gadowski, partner at Team Europe, presses home the point: “Kite Ventures and the other investors remain focused on the long-term strategy. But they also know that Delivery Hero is knocking on the door of global domination, so they want to keep the pace.”

Global domination it is then, although no doubt European rival Just-Eat will have something to say about that.