Today is turning out to be quite a memorable Monday — hot on the heels of Yahoo’s Tumblr acquisition announcement, online food ordering services GrubHub and Seamless have officially confirmed that the two companies will merge into one as we previously reported.
Many of the juicy details — like what this new entity will actually be called — are still shrouded in secrecy, but the announcement has shed some light on how the new company’s executive structure will be set up. GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney will take the reins as the entity’s chief executive, while Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky is slated to become the company’s president.
As our own Rip Empson pointed out on Friday, the tie-up is set to take place as the online good delivery and ordering space has begun to heat up. A handful of new startups have their respective eyes set on cracking the market (think ChowNow and HealthyOut, just to name a few), while more entrenched players like Delivery.com continue to putter along.
Now that two of the most prominent companies in that space are dedicating to combining forces, we may soon see some of those small fries get pushed out. After all, by combining the resources of both companies (which jointly generated over $100 million in revenue in 2012), the new combined entity will have enough resources to grow its business both in the United States and in the U.K. where Seamless has maintained a foothold for some time. Of course, this whole shebang is still subject to regulatory approval, so it’s possible someone could raise those same sorts of anti-competitive concerns down the road. For now though, I suspect that more than a few people are just happy knowing that they’ll be able to order even more food from a single service.
Developing…