Food Delivery Startup Gets $535 Million In Funding, Now Valued At $1.4 Billion

DoorDash is a food delivery firm that recently raised quite a bit of money thanks to the substantial influence of Japanese financial giant SoftBank. A recent round of funding raised $535 million for the company, raising its valuation to $1.4 billion. Apparently, the startup needed that money to expand its services to other cities.

As Fortune notes, there are so many food delivery companies in the U.S. that it can often be tough to keep track of them all. As such, in order to compete with all of these other firms, many of which have been established far longer than the startup, DoorDash will need to expand quickly. Thanks to SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, and GIC, the sovereign wealth fund from Singapore, this is now going to be possible.

DoorDash is currently operating in 600 cities in the U.S. and CEO Tony Xu wants to increase that to 1,600 by the end of the year. According to Xu, this success in funding, which was only supposed to raise $200 million is proof that investors see his company as a winner. However, this might not exactly be the case.

It would seem that SoftBank is such a prolific investor in western companies that it actually already has a stake in the food delivery market in the form of UberEATS, Recode reports. Its intention to fund DoorDash actually caused a bit of a stir among investors of the cab-hailing/food delivery firm, but the Japanese entity apparently sees no conflict.

SoftBank reportedly believes that the market for delivering food from restaurants to customers is big enough that it can support two dominant players along with a few smaller ones. Even knowing about this, Xu is also confident that his company is going to come out on top and said that he is fine with the financial giant hedging its bet.