GoPuff Continues to Grow
The Philadelphia-based on-demand convenience store says it’s worth nearly $4 billion.
Oct 12, 2020 | 2 min read
PHILADELPHIA—GoPuff, a virtual on-demand convenience store, continues to draw venture capital funding, announcing last week it has secured $380 million on top of $750 million raised last winter, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, as it expands to meet increased demand for convenient last-mile delivery services.
GoPuff has been on a hiring spree in recent months, snatching up retail and tech heavyweights, including new chief customer officer, Jocelyn Wong, who was chief marketing officer at Lowe’s, and new chief business officer, Jonathan DiOrio, who headed fintech at Uber. Rekha Singh, vice president of engineering, hails from TripAdvisor. The company has a workforce of 4,000 drivers, warehouse laborers, and sales and software pros.
Founded by Drexel University students Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola in 2013, GoPuff says it is now worth close to $4 billion. GoPuff ranks No. 22 on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list of “private companies at the epicenter of a changing world, poised to emerge from the pandemic as the next generation of billion-dollar businesses.”
For a $1.95 flat fee, GoPuff delivers thousands of items from groceries, snacks and beverages to cleaning supplies, personal care items and household electronics, 24/7 in most markets. Customers order via an app, and their selections arrive within 30 minutes. The start-up operates in more than 500 cities across the U.S., sourcing items directly from manufacturers and working with distributors to fill orders from more than 200 micro-fulfillment centers.
With its “industry-leading economics,” GoPuff could “become the fastest and best delivery service for everyday needs,” Daniel Sundheim, founder of D1 Capital Partners of New York, said in a statement. D1 participated in the latest fundraising round with Silicon Valley’s Accel Partners.
Gola told TechCrunch that GoPuff differentiates itself from Uber and Amazon in some key ways.
“There’s nothing like GoPuff, so we had to build everything from scratch,” the GoPuff co-CEO said. “Whether it’s our location-based inventory system or many things related to our technology, that’s all ours. And then when you talk about differentiation from the customer side, we control the inventory and can make sure that the customers get exactly what they ordered. That focus on our customer is how we’re going to win long-term, and it’s how we got to the point of where we are today.”
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