Startup Maple Being Sold To UK’s Deliveroo

Maple, the food delivery company in New York, has shuttered its doors as of Monday (May 8).

According to a report, the startup, which blasted on the scene a little more than two years ago, was acquired by Deliveroo, a London company, for an undisclosed sum. Deliveroo plans to use Maple’s technology to expand its platform. The report noted that some of the New York team members of Maple will join Deliveroo in the U.K.

In a letter to its customers, Maple cofounders Caleb Merkl and Akshay Navle said, “Over the past several months we’ve been spending most of our time thinking about the future of our business — what comes next for Maple? The more time we spent trying to answer this question, the more evident it became that of all the paths we had contemplated, the most compelling next step in Maple’s story involved a shift from our current approach. While an incredibly difficult decision for Akshay and me given the effect on our core operations, it became clear that we needed to close the Maple operation here in New York and look for a partner with scale — one that would allow us to leverage all that we had built across a broader platform.”

The executives went on to say that given the overlap in goals with Deliveroo, it made sense to sell the business to the U.K. food delivery company. According to the report, when Maple began operations, it pioneered a new business model because the company operated out of a commissary kitchen and created delivery kitchen hubs, which resulted in shorter wait times. Still, the company ended up losing money on every meal in 2015, noted the report.