Chicago-based startup GrubHub, a service that lets you order food for delivery or take out from local restaurants online or by mobile phone, has raised $50 million in Series E funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with Mesirow Financial, Benchmark Capital, Greenspring Associates and DAG Ventures participating. The company has also acquired New York-based food delivery network Dotmenu, the parent company of Campusfood and Allmenus. This brings GrubHub’s total funding to $84 million.
GrubHub gives its users access to food delivery service from more than 13,000 restaurants in U.S. cities including: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Denver and Boulder.
GrubHub is free for diners who order and pay for their meals with while restaurants pay
commissions on each order processed. Restaurants that do not currently partner with GrubHub can still list their telephone numbers and menus for free. And of the 13,000 restaurant menus currently available on GrubHub, 5,000 establishments are paying GrubHub to manage and market a white-label online order and food delivery service.
Dotmenu has a foothold in menus and food delivery in the college market (with a presence in over 300 markets in the U.S.), and through the acquisition, GrubHub says it will have the largest restaurant listing platform in the country with 250,000 restaurant menus in over 50 major cities and college towns across the US. The two companies are projected to send over $225 million in combined order revenues to independent restaurants in 2011.
Benchmark’s Bill Gurley sais this of the deal and GrubHub: By combining its ability to aggressively scale its footprint and mobile platforms with Dotmenu’s proven leadership in college markets across the country, GrubHub is the clear leader in the online ordering space…This move will make GrubHub a household name, such as Benchmark’s other on-line portfolio companies OpenTable, Yelp and Zillow.
GrubHub founder Matt Maloney has a goal of taking GrubHub public, also following in the footsteps of OpenTable, which filed for an IPO back in 2009. “Going public is a very realistic opportunity for us within the next two years,” Maloney told us in March when the company raised $20 million.
At the time, Maloney said GrubHub had experienced a 300 percent increase in mobile food orders since last Fall and projects projects mobile orders to make up 20 percent of its total food sales by the end of 2011, which is compared to less than two percent in 2009 (mobile food orders accounted for 10 percent of total food sales in 2010).
Maloney said the acquisition price of Dotmenu was under $50 million. He also added that this year’s revenue will be over $30 million, up from $8.5 million in 2010 revenue.