Rocket Internet Buys Food Site Stake for $1.9 Billion Value

by Christopher Spillane

(Bloomberg) -- Rocket Internet AG, the startup investor founded by Germany’s Samwer brothers, bought a minority stake in Delivery Hero that values the four-year-old online food takeaway service at almost $2 billion.
Rocket paid 496 million euros ($568 million) for a 30 percent holding in the company, which has operations in 24 countries across Europe and South America. Called Lieferheld locally and featuring a mascot reminiscent of comic hero Superman, Delivery Hero’s early backers included publisher Georg von Holtzbrinck and food retailer Tengelmann.
Rocket, which became famous for cloning businesses from Groupon Inc. to Airbnb Inc., last year raised 1.4 billion euros in an initial public offering that turned brothers Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer into billionaires and provided Rocket with funds to push deeper into e-commerce in emerging markets.

In November, Rocket’s own food-delivery units
exchanged local businesses in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru for Delivery Hero units in India and Mexico so the two companies would no longer compete in those markets.
Delivery Hero, founded by Team Europe Ventures in Berlin, aggregrates take-away ordering services by placing menus online and organizes neighborhood restaurants on the Web. Its other investors include Insight Venture Partners LP, Kite Ventures PE, ru-Net Ltd., Point Nine Capital, Phenomen Ventures and Vostok Nafta Investment Ltd.
Rocket’s shares rose 6.2 percent to 49.81 euros at 9:48 a.m. in Frankfurt. The stock has climbed about 17 percent since the IPO, valuing the company at 7.6 billion euros.
(An earlier version of the story was corrected for a spelling error in Samwer.)