DoorDash To Acquire Rickshaw

In a recent TechCrunch article, on-demand restaurant delivery service DoorDash announced it is acquiring Rickshaw to boost same-day delivery offerings. Rickshaw is a Y Combinator graduate startup that helps businesses make same-day deliveries happen by pairing them with courier networks and managing the logistics of the last delivery mile.

DoorDash had been working on a similar solution called Drive, a platform which was designed to provide users with access to its delivery network apart from its consumer-focused website and app.

Rickshaw is profitable, according to its CEO, Divya Bhat. Bhat told TechCrunch the firm had achieved the status based on the efforts of a “super small, scrappy team” of just four full-time people. But, as the firm was moving away from bootstrapping and toward a Series A round, it faced “taking a big step back and building a bunch of generic [infrastructures].”

An acquisition by the DoorDash team, with which Rickshaw was already familiar, was a natural move.

“It was a really natural fit,” Bhat said.

The terms of the deal remain unknown. Three Rickshaw team members will be joining DoorDash, however. DoorDash’s CEO, Tony Xu, described the merger as “an acquihire,” in a recent blog post.

“A lot of the know-how and software behind Rickshaw and what they’ve built certainly will be applied very directly to our Drive product,” Xu told TechCrunch. “At the same time, this is fairly complicated … It’s not just a copy-and-paste.”

According to TechCrunch, Xu said there will be careful consideration to do things “the right way.”

While the Rickshaw service will be shuttered, Bhat and her team will help their firm’s customers find products to meet their needs — some of which will not be DoorDash Drive offerings, Bhat explained, stating the Drive solution is “different enough that it wouldn’t make a great full transition.”