On-demand delivery service Postmates has reportedly come a long way since breaking onto the food, grocery and logistics startup scene five years back. In a recent interview, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann told Forbes that the logistics startup has achieved an annualized run rate of $1 billion in gross merchandise volume in the first quarter of 2017.
In the same period, Postmate’s revenue run rate is an estimated $250 million, comprised of paid customer delivery fees and a 15 to 30 percent commission merchants pay to be featured on the app.
For comparison, on-demand delivery industry leader GrubHub saw $3 billion gross merchandise volume and just over $493 million in revenue in 2016, raking in some eight million average monthly orders.
By this time next year, Lehmann told Forbes, he hopes to see a revenue run rate of $1 billion, with an IPO to come sometime in 2019. If anything, this could be just the beginning for startups in the food, grocery and delivery space.
“The total food and grocery market in the U.S. is $1.4 trillion,” Lehmann was quoted as saying. “Currently addressed from that market on mobile: 1.4 percent. Less than two percent. I believe there will be companies in the food space bigger than Postmates or Instacart or Seamless, and they don’t exist today.”
As of November last year, Postmates raised $140 million, implying a valuation of as much as $600 million. At the time, the company reported some 6,000 merchants in place and about 1.5 million monthly deliveries.
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The next major goal for Postmates is profitability, which Lehmann told Forbes the company hopes to reach by the end of 2017 or by early 2018. The company’s recent move to begin beer, wine and spirit delivery in San Francisco and Los Angeles could certainly help push them toward their goals.
“This is the first of many new on-demand shopping experiences to come. We’ve always prided ourselves on the choice that we give our customers,” Postmates previously wrote in a company blog post.
