DoorDash CEO Tony Xu. Photo credit: Village Global, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Food delivery company DoorDash has just filed to go public, seeking to do so after just seven years of existence wherein it’s seen rapid growth and raised a total of $2.5 billion in outside funding. DoorDash has hired major investment banks including Goldman Sachs, UBS, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank Securities to lead its public offering, listing a placeholder amount of $100 million that’s, however, subject to change.

In this article, we dig into DoorDash’s financials as revealed in its extensive S-1 filing. 

Revenue

In the nine months of this year leading up to September, DoorDash pulled in $1.9 billion in revenue, more than triple the $587 million it pulled in during the same period last year. The high revenue surge is easily explained by a coronavirus pandemic that has widely boosted the need for online delivery services as people have generally distanced from in-person shopping. 

As DoorDash pulled in $1.9 billion in revenue in the nine months leading to September, the company also reported $149 million in losses. In the same period last year, DoorDash reported a much higher loss of $534 million, indicating that a business boost amid the coronavirus pandemic has significantly reduced its losses. 

In previous years, DoorDash had recorded big losses; $667 million in the whole of 2019 and $204 million in 2018. In those same years, the company pulled in $885 million and $291 million in revenue respectively. 

Throughout its existence, DoorDash has raised a total of $2.5 billion in outside funding so the company has had enough runway to absorb losses. It ended the month of September with $1.6 billion in cash on its balance sheet.

Investors

Investor Keith Rabois led a $2.4 million round for DoorDash in 2013 on behalf of Khosla Ventures. He has since left the venture capital firm for another venture capital firm, Founders Fund. Photo credit: TechCrunch, licensed under CC BY 2.0

DoorDash has raised funding from a host of investors that include some of the biggest names in the technology investment scene. The company’s backers include the likes of Sequoia Capital, DST Global, Temasek, T. Rowe Price, Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, SoftBank, Kleiner Perkins, Durable Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures, and GIC.

Some of the aforementioned investors went in early on DoorDash, two examples being Khosla Ventures which led a $2.4 million round for the company back in 2013 and Sequoia which led a $17.3 million round for the company in 2014. Compared to that time, DoorDash has grown very much bigger and as such is set to clinch big profits for some of its backers as it rides on its way to the public markets. 

Even with DoorDash’s current valuation of $16 billion from its most recent financing round, it can be said that early investors in the company have reaped bountiful rewards. 

Founders

DoorDash was founded by four people namely Tony Xu, its current CEO; Andy Fang who is CTO; Stanley Tang who is Chief Product Officer; and Evan Moore who left the company to become a partner at Khosla Ventures. The founders have apparently done good for themselves, with Xu holding a 5.2% stake while Tang and Fang each hold 4.7% stakes. Moore is no longer at DoorDash so doesn’t have his stake listed but it’s assumedly on par with that of the other founders.

In addition to their vested stakes, DoorDash’s founders also hold lucrative options in the company. Judging from its $16 billion private value, the founders are set to each gain hundreds of millions of dollars from the company they launched seven years ago. More so, DoorDash could soar higher on the public markets and in turn increase the value of their stakes, maybe making a few billionaires in the process.

Overview

DoorDash overall is one of the biggest on-demand delivery companies in the US, on par with the likes of Uber Eats, Postmates, and Instacart. Just like DoorDash, one of its main rivals which is Postmates was looking to go public and had already submitted a confidential filing to do so before delaying and getting sold to Uber for $2.7 billion in the end.

On-demand delivery services like DoorDash have ironically benefitted greatly from the coronavirus pandemic, with most of them reporting record sales this year. Just like DoorDash, another delivery company, Instacart which focuses on groceries, is also eyeing a soon public listing.

DoorDash had submitted a draft confidential filing to go public as early as February this year, signaling that the company is likely looking to complete a public offering before the end of this year.

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