Uber, the fast-growing and controversial taxi app, has its eyes on your pizza. As the company looks to expand beyond cabs – and shore up its $40bn valuation – Uber is getting into the delivery business.



The San Francisco-based company has just launched UberEats which it promises “gets you the best meals from the best local restaurants in under 10 minutes”. The service is launching in Barcelona, just months after the Spanish authorities banned Uber from offering taxi services in the country. Uber’s Barcelona drivers will be available for food deliveries “seven days a week for both lunch and dinner”.

“In the same time it takes you to walk up Las Ramblas you can open up your Uber app, choose your meal and get it delivered to an address of your choice,” Uber said in a blogpost.

It comes two months after Uber launched a similar service, Uber Fresh, in Los Angeles. The company said it is “working hard to expand to other neighbourhoods soon”. Uber declined to comment on which cities it is planning to roll the service out to next.

“Uber is a technology company, and innovation is what we do,” a spokesman said. “It’s in our DNA. We are always exploring different on-demand services and UberEats is one example of the innovative potential of our technology. UberEats shows how technology is creating convenience and choice but more importantly encouraging economic growth through innovation.”

Analysts said they expected food delivery to be the first of several new services Uber will launch in coming months in attempt to justify the sky-high valuation placed on the company at its latest venture capital funding drive in December.

Douglas McCabe from Enders Analysis said: “Relatively small deliveries make a lot of sense. It’s the same model as delivering a person. Not least, there is probably spare vehicle capacity during the day. But Uber’s ambitions might be beyond that: you can envisage the strategy paper that shows how they ultimately aim to replace the private car in cities and arguably public transport.

“One can list many barriers to the seamless delivery of that strategy, and there are many questions about what is more achievable in the US compared to Europe, but Uber may be able to gain considerable traction in verticals such as food deliveries.”

Sam Hamadeh, founder of analyst PrivCo, said, Uber has pitched itself to venture capitalist as a future logistics company to rival UPS or FedEx and it is now attempting to prove to investors that is more than just a taxi app.

“In documents shown to VCs it doesn’t emphasis Uber as a taxi, it pitches Uber as a logistics company – as being the solution to e-commerce solving the last mile delivery problem.

“Rather than compare themselves to local taxi companies, they think think of their competitors as the US Postal Service, FedEx or DHL. They have to justify the amount of the money the raised at a $40bn valuation.”

At $40bn Uber is worth more than big listed companies including Delta Airlines and Kraft. Hamadeh is skeptical that the company can live up to that promise but he said the company wouldn’t give up without a fight.

“When VCs invest at $40bn they expect the company to go public at twice that. Uber is creating a cage for itself, it’s hard to imagine what the exit route is. It is too expensive to remain a taxi application. It has to expand into everything,” said Hamadeh. “Uber say they do not only want to defeat their competitors they want to crush them and leave them dead in an alleyway.”