After in search of a purchaser for greater than two years, Simply Eat Takeaway.com has lastly closed the menu on Grubhub. On Tuesday, the Dutch meals supply large mentioned it accomplished the sale of the U.S. enterprise to Marvel, the meals startup based and led by e-commerce veteran Marc Lore. The deal has an enterprise worth of $650 million, however Grubhub is coming laden with $500 million of debt. Including in different M&A charges, Simply Eat Takeaway shall be strolling away with a mere $50 million, a small fraction of the $7.3 billion valuation that Grubhub had when Simply Eat Takeaway devoured it up in an all-share deal in 2020.
The sale, which was first introduced in November 2024, underscores the continuing downsizing — or right-sizing? — within the trade to focus extra on profitability after years of overinvestment and unrealistic progress targets. Simply Eat Takeaway says it is going to flip its focus in direction of “funding in nations through which it has the best aggressive benefit.”
Within the case of Marvel, Lore is considerably of a legend on the earth of e-commerce, beforehand founding and promoting corporations to Amazon and Walmart. Marvel has raised round $1.7 billion and has ambitions to go public within the coming years at a $40 billion valuation, Lore has mentioned, however that can imply that the enterprise has to develop significantly past what it’s right this moment. Grubhub offers it a nationwide footprint — albeit one which has been working with heavy debt for a while. The problem shall be whether or not Marvel manages to lastly flip that round.
