GrubHub Will Buy Eat24 From Yelp For $287.5M, Free Delivery
Just two and a half years ago, Yelp acquired the food delivery site and app Eat24, which seemed like a complementary business at the time. Now GrubHub is buying the site for $287.5 million — a little more than double what Yelp paid for it in 2015 — while the two companies will keep linking to each other and referring customers back and forth.
While some people speculated that GrubHub could be an acquisition target for Amazon after the Everything Store announced that it would be acquiring Whole Foods, instead, the company has gone on its own acquiring spree.
In addition to the robot-powered Eat24, this week GrubHub also acquired OrderUp, a food ordering site owned by Groupon. Coincidentally, Groupon acquired that site in 2015, the same year that Yelp acquired Eat24.
Grubhub has acquired much of the market across the country for online food ordering, gobbling up sites like Allmenus and Seamless. While other companies like Postmates and even Uber have tried to enter the market, GrubHub still dominates.
Regulators would still need to approve the deal, and one possible antitrust concern is that this deal would give GrubHub even more power over restaurant owners. If they don’t accept GrubHub’s commissions and other terms, they’ll miss out on making sales to the many users that the company has or has acquired through mergers.
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