The Deliveroo founder Will Shu could be set for a payout of nearly £150m ($200m), with reports that Uber has been in talks to buy the London-based food delivery service for at least £1.5bn.

Uber has said it wants to build scale in the takeaway delivery market as its Uber Eats service battles heavy competition in the US from Grubhub.

In the UK, Deliveroo and Uber Eats were set to face increased competition from Just Eat, the takeaway ordering app which has announced plans to launch its own delivery fleet.

With millennials three times more likely to “order in” than their parents, there has been a scramble to control a market that is expected to be worth £279bn by 2030, up from £27bn today, according to analysts at the broker UBS.

More than half of takeaways are now ordered online in the UK and that share of the market has been increasing by about 5% a year.

Bloomberg reported that the takeover talks, which are said to be at an early stage, might be hindered by Deliveroo mulling whether to retain its independence and push ahead with a potential £1.5bn stock market flotation in the next 18 months.

However, Richard Clarke, an analyst at the stockbroker Bernstein, said Uber could potentially offer Shu a more lucrative alternative. Shu is thought to have a stake of at least 9% in Deliveroo and he and his fellow shareholders could be offered more cash than they could raise on the stock market.

“We’ve seen a couple of times that private money and the power of synergies can mean the wins can be larger and they can [have] more value,” said Clarke. Bernstein pointed to Coca-Cola’s takeover of Whitbread’s cafe chain Costa Coffee and Pret a Manger’s acquisition by Krispy Kreme owner JAB Holdings after both chains had been considering stock market listings instead. Shu, an American former investment banker, founded Deliveroo in 2013.

Deliveroo, which has 15,000 riders in the UK alone, would hand Uber access to a broader array of restaurants and takeaway fans, particularly in European markets such as France and Spain. That would enable it to save costs by delivering more pizzas and burgers per square mile. A merger would also remove one of Uber’s biggest UK competitors from the scene.

“The market is consolidating pretty quickly,” said Clarke. “Building scale and improving the density of [delivery] drops is an enormous help to profitability.”