Postmates

Postmates was an on-demand delivery company in San Francisco. Through its app and website, couriers delivered restaurant meals and other local goods. Bastian Lehmann, Sean Plaice and Sam Street founded it on May 1, 2011, and it went through the AngelPad accelerator that year. Its main competitors were Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats. It also opened an API so merchants could use its delivery network, and it expanded to Mexico City in 2017.

Spark Capital, Founders Fund, Uncork Capital and Slow Ventures were among its early venture backers. In 2016 Postmates raised $140 million at a $600 million valuation. In September 2018 Tiger Global Management led a $300 million round, Tiger's Scott Schleifer joined the board, and Fortune reported a $1.2 billion valuation. In January 2019 BlackRock joined as a new investor in a $100 million round at a reported $1.85 billion valuation, which brought total venture funding to $681 million. In September 2019 GPI Capital, a private equity firm that takes minority stakes, led a $225 million round at a $2.4 billion valuation, taking total funding to nearly $1 billion.

Postmates filed confidentially for an IPO in February 2019, and by September 2019 JPMorgan and Bank of America were lined up to lead it, but the company never listed. Around that time it reported about 5 million deliveries a month across more than 550 cities and projected about $400 million in 2018 revenue. On July 6, 2020, Uber announced a definitive agreement to buy Postmates for about $2.65 billion in an all-stock deal, and its December 1, 2020 Form 8-K confirmed completion. Postmates kept its own brand and front end, while back-end operations such as the courier pool were combined with Uber Eats.

Postmates is an example of a late-stage company that prepared for an IPO and ended up taking a strategic sale. Seed and early venture investors such as Spark Capital, Founders Fund, Uncork and Slow Ventures held their stakes for about nine years before the exit. The $2.65 billion sale price was about 10% above GPI Capital's $2.4 billion entry valuation from ten months earlier. Because Uber paid in its own stock, each holder's return depended on when they sold their Uber shares after the close.