After searching for a purchaser for greater than two years, Simply Eat Takeaway.com has lastly closed the menu on Grubhub. On Tuesday, the Dutch meals supply big mentioned it accomplished the sale of the U.S. enterprise to Surprise, 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 wolfed 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 business to focus extra on profitability after years of overinvestment and unrealistic progress targets. Simply Eat Takeaway says it would flip its focus in direction of “funding in nations wherein it has the best aggressive benefit.”
Within the case of Surprise, Lore is considerably of a legend on this planet of e-commerce, beforehand founding and promoting corporations to Amazon and Walmart. Surprise 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 at present. 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 Surprise manages to lastly flip that round.