As DoorDash reports its latest financial results on Wednesday, it’s clear that the 12-year-old company has dominated the restaurant delivery wars in the U.S. over Uber Eats and Grubhub, owning somewhere around two-thirds of the market thanks in part to its prescient move into the suburbs that was supercharged by COVID-19 lockdowns.
That market lead alone has encouraged investors to bid up its stock price to more than $250 a share and a market cap north of $108 billion as of Tuesday. All told, DoorDash shares have more than doubled over the past year.
And considering that DoorDash finished 2024 with its first-ever annual profit, the San Francisco–based company led by cofounder Tony Xu appears well positioned to continue thriving in the U.S. food delivery business.
But if you look at DoorDash’s investment and M&A activity this year, you’ll see signs of a company that has quietly laid the foundation for a much grander ambition beyond restaurant delivery in the U.S. And if it’s successful—still a big if—DoorDash will someday be known as much more central to the technological fabric of restaurants and other local retailers around the globe than it is today.
In May, the company announced a double whammy of two proposed acquisitions: one, a nearly $4 billion deal for Deliveroo, which would give DoorDash a top three meal delivery business in the U.K., and a combined presence in more than 40 countries—with the intent of turning DoorDash’s core restaurant delivery operation into a truly global one. (DoorDash previously acquired Finland-based Wolt in 2022 for around $8 billion in an all-stock deal.)
The other acquisition was a $1.2 billion deal for the hospitality software company SevenRooms, which makes software products aimed at helping restaurants, hotels, and other hospitality businesses manage bookings, reservations, and their customer relationships. The decision to buy SevenRooms was led by Parisa Sadrzadeh, a former rising star at Amazon whose mandate when hired at DoorDash last year was to expand the company’s suite of software tools, called DoorDash Commerce Platform, that helps brick-and-mortar restaurants and retailers grow and manage their businesses inside their physical locations in addition to any delivery operations.
“While DoorDash solved a massive problem for merchants during the pandemic … introducing a delivery capability to many who had never considered doing it before,” Sadrzadeh told Fortune in May, “[another] challenge ended up being, ‘How do you grow my actual volume in my physical store, because those are my most profitable consumers?‘”
Weeks after announcing the pair of May acquisitions, DoorDash continued the buying spree by announcing a $175 million acquisition of the advertising technology startup Symbiosys, which is designed to help brands and retailers who advertise on the DoorDash app also reach DoorDash customers on other platforms around the web. DoorDash said that its ad business crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue in 2024. Online advertising businesses have increasingly become key profit engines for online retailers and marketplaces. While DoorDash doesn’t break out financial results for its ad business, analysts have estimated that it carries a much larger profit margin than its core delivery business.
In the background, DoorDash has continued to aggressively go after other types of consumer spending, too, signing delivery partnerships with retailers big and small across grocery, pharmacy, pet, sporting goods, and alcohol categories as well.
Taken together, DoorDash is laying out an ambitious vision—it’ll take time to judge if it’s too ambitious and distracting or as prescient as its suburban delivery move—to become a much more comprehensive technology player for restaurants and other brick-and-mortar retailers across the globe. At the same time, even with a market cap of $100 billion–plus, the company still has potential for considerable growth within its core business of restaurant delivery in markets around the world.
“If you took our oldest area of exploration, U.S. restaurants … we’re still single-digit percentages of the U.S. restaurant industry sales,” CEO Xu said on an earnings call earlier this year. “If you look at globally, that number would be even smaller.”
