Owen Thomas, Business Insider
The new round of funding, led by Tiger Global Management, will be used to expand into deliveries beyond just food, and to introduce a new service that charges customers $1 each for deliveries at peak hours, CEO Bastian Lehmann tells The Wall Street Journal.
Previously, the company raised $58 million from investors including Spark Capital, AngelPad, and SoftTech VC.
Postmates is part of a competitive group of on-demand delivery services. One of its New York-based competitors, WunWun, sold to startup Alfred earlier this month. But one thing that makes Postmates stand out is its dedication to delivering goods in under an hour. Another is its partnerships with high-profile companies.
Earlier this year, Postmates signed a partnership with Chipotle, which would allow it to deliver Chipotle food in the 67 markets where it operates. Starbucks is another Postmates partner - starting in Seattle, the company will deliver your coffee for you, on-demand.
Postmates is growing like crazy: it took 116 weeks for the startup to reach 500,000 cumulative deliveries in the US, but it only took 20 weeks to achieve the next 500,000 deliveries, and just 10 more weeks for the next 500,000. Some of its markets are individually profitable, Lehmann told the Journal, but the company as a whole is not.
With the news of the new infusion of capital, Postmates also revealed some new stats: the company has completed 2.8 million deliveries across 28 markets; its gross profit is on track to grow by more than 10x in 2015, compared to last year; and the company now has 13,000 Postmates doing deliveries.