(Bloomberg) -- Postmates Inc., a San Francisco-based restaurant delivery company, said it raised $300 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global Management.
The investment values Postmates at about $1.2 billion, said a person familiar with the terms of the deal, which are private. That doubles the closely held company's previous valuation from 2016, the person said. Postmates is “eyeing 2019 for the IPO,” co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Bastian Lehmann said in an statement.
The deal gives Postmates some much-needed backing in the highly competitive food-delivery business. GrubHub Inc., Square Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc., along with a bunch of startups, are all trying to lure customers to their delivery apps via steep discounts and promotions that usually cost the delivery companies money. This year, San Francisco-based restaurant delivery upstart, DoorDash Inc., raised $785 million from major funds including Coatue Management LLC, DST Global, SoftBank Group Corp.'s Vision Fund and Sequoia Capital.
Postmates will appoint Scott Shleifer, a partner at Tiger Global Management, as a director. With the new funding, Lehmann said Postmates plans to make its delivery network more efficient and reliable by advancing the technology its restaurant merchants use at point-of-sale. The company is also researching ways to use automation and robots to make cheaper and faster deliveries.
To contact the reporter on this story: Olivia Zaleski in San Francisco at ozaleski@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Anne VanderMey
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