San Francisco-based on-demand restaurant delivery service DoorDash has announced the acquisition of Y-Combinator startup Rickshaw, TechCrunch reports.
A lot of startups are founded and developed only with the ultimate objective of hiving it off to another firm, when the time and the price are appropriate. Some startups outgrow their size and have to call it a day and move on. Delivery and logistics firm Rickshaw has done exactly that.
Promoted by Divya Bhatt and nurtured into a profit-making venture, Rickshaw has been operating within San Francisco and the Bay Area and had built up a loyal customer with just employes, described by Bhatt as a “super small scrappy team”.
Their business model revolved around making sure of same day deliveries for their business customers through offering a linkage to couriers and by managing the logistics.
Door Dash is also in the same day delivery space and it has also successfully developed a model, ‘Drive’, which works on making it smooth for the businesses to reach their products to their customers by using the network offered by Door Dash and the linkage to the courier networks for the last mile deliveries.
Rickshaw’s Bhatt claims that their going for the next level of funding would have meant expanding the business beyond their original objective and building a larger infrastructure. As part of the new arrangement, three of her staff would join DoorDash and this was described by Door Dash’s management as more of an “acquihire” than just an acquisition. It appears to be a win-win situation for both Door Dash as well as Rickshaw. The exact value of the transaction, however, has not been made public.
The Door Dash team acknowledged that the system developed by Rickshaw is going to be quite useful for them and they will take it on board. But it is being emphasized that it won’t mean a simply ‘copy and paste’ type of integration.
Rickshaw will go back to their customers in ensuring that there is a smooth transition for them, whether they decide to sign on with Drive or to choose other products to make the deliveries being handled by Rickshaw.