Who owns Deliveroo? | Highstreett

Who owns Deliveroo?

Deliveroo is owned by DoorDash, which is based in San Francisco. The takeover completed on 2 October 2025, Deliveroo was delisted from the London Stock Exchange, and it is no longer a British company.

Hello, I wanted to write this one because Deliveroo is probably the app on your phone that changed hands most recently without anyone really noticing. Nothing about it looks any different. The app is the same, the name is the same, the riders are the same people. The company behind it is not.

Is Deliveroo still British?

No, not since October 2025.

Deliveroo was founded in London in 2013 by Will Shu and Greg Orlowski, and it listed on the London Stock Exchange in March 2021. DoorDash agreed to buy it in May 2025 at 180p a share, the High Court sanctioned the deal on 30 September, and it completed on 2 October. Deliveroo shares stopped trading that day.

The head office is still in London and DoorDash said it did not plan major changes there, so it is British in the sense that the building is here. It is not British in the sense of who owns it or where the profits end up.

How much did DoorDash pay for Deliveroo?

£2.9 billion, which is a lot less than Deliveroo was worth on the day it floated.

The 2021 IPO priced shares at 390p and valued the company at £7.6 billion. It was one of the biggest London listings in years and it went badly almost immediately, with the share price dropping on the first day of trading. DoorDash paid 180p a share four years later.

So the company was sold for well under half what public investors first valued it at. If you bought at the IPO you lost more than half your money, and if you sold at 180p you did so to an American buyer.

Who is DoorDash?

The biggest food delivery company in America, founded in San Francisco in 2013, which is the same year Deliveroo started.

It is listed on the Nasdaq and it had already bought its way into Europe once before, taking over the Finnish company Wolt in 2022. With Deliveroo added it now operates in about 40 countries. Deliveroo brought it around 176,000 restaurant, grocery and retail partners, over 130,000 riders and roughly 7 million monthly customers.

Who runs Deliveroo now?

Miki Kuusi, who came from DoorDash rather than from Deliveroo.

Will Shu, who co-founded the company and had run it for twelve years, stepped down shortly before the deal finalised. Kuusi was previously head of international at DoorDash and founded Wolt, the Finnish company DoorDash bought in 2022.

Shu was also Deliveroo's largest shareholder, and reporting at the time put his personal proceeds from the sale at over £170 million. Staff holding around 36 million shares between them shared roughly £65 million.

That is the part I find hard to get past. Shareholders who came in at the float lost more than half their money. The founder made £170 million. Both of those things are true about the same four years.

Did anyone lose their job?

Yes, up to 830 roles were expected to go, mostly in support and administrative functions.

DoorDash said it would keep the London headquarters and honour Deliveroo's existing agreement with the GMB union, which represents riders. So the rider arrangements were left in place and the back office was where the cuts landed, which is the normal shape of these things.

Has anything changed for customers?

Not much that you would notice, and that is sort of the point.

The app still works the same way. The name is the same. DoorDash said explicitly that the Deliveroo app and products were not going anywhere. If you order a takeaway from a restaurant in your town tonight, that is a British customer buying from a British restaurant, and the commission on it now goes to a company in San Francisco.

Angus Hanton has a good way of describing this in his book Vassal State. He says American companies did not just buy British assets, they bought the bridges: the crossings everyone has to pay a toll to use. The transaction is local and the toll is not.

Doesn't DoorDash say it supports local businesses too?

It does, and I think it is worth quoting rather than ignoring.

In the letter DoorDash published on the day the deal completed, its chief executive wrote that the company's mission from the start was to grow and empower local economies, that it wanted every local business to be able to connect with every local consumer, and that it wanted communities to thrive with vibrant high streets.

That is more or less what I would say about what we are doing, which is uncomfortable, so here is the actual difference as I see it. A delivery marketplace makes money by taking a percentage of what independent restaurants sell. The commission on UK orders now flows to a company headquartered in California. Saying you support local businesses and taking a cut of what they sell are not incompatible, but they are not the same thing either, and the second one is the bit that shows up in the accounts.

I should be straight that this cuts at us as well. If Highstreett ever takes a percentage of what independent shops sell, we are a bridge too. The only honest defence is being clear about what the toll pays for and who sets it, which is why I am writing it down now rather than after.

Is this just an American thing?

No, and I think the nationality framing gets this wrong.

American ownership is the biggest single slice of it. Hanton's figures put American companies' sales in Britain at around 25% of GDP, against 9% in Germany and 7% in France, so Britain really is more exposed than comparable countries.

But when I look at the businesses we have had to exclude from Highstreett in Lincoln, most are not American. Greene King has been owned since 2019 by CK Asset Holdings in Hong Kong. Mitchells and Butlers is a Birmingham company listed in London. TGJones, which is what most WHSmith high street shops became, is owned by a British private equity firm.

What they have in common is not a passport. It is distance between the owner and the place the money comes from.

What can you actually do about it?

Order direct from the restaurant, if you can be bothered, and quite a lot of the time you can.

Most independent restaurants will take an order over the phone and a lot now have their own online ordering, and the difference to them is significant because delivery platform commission is one of the larger costs they carry. It is less convenient. That is a real trade-off and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

If you want to find the independent places near you in the first place, that is what we built Highstreett for, and everything on it has had its ownership checked against Companies House.

Questions people ask

Is Deliveroo owned by Uber? No, that is a different company. Uber owns Uber Eats, which competes with Deliveroo. Deliveroo is owned by DoorDash.

Is Just Eat British? No. Just Eat merged with the Dutch company Takeaway.com in 2020 to form Just Eat Takeaway, and that group was bought in 2025 by Prosus, which is Dutch listed and majority owned by the South African group Naspers. So the three big delivery apps in Britain are American, American and Dutch or South African depending how you count it.

Why did Deliveroo sell for so much less than its float price? The 2021 IPO was widely seen as overpriced and the shares fell on day one. The business had also never made a full year profit at that point. By 2025 the delivery sector was consolidating and Deliveroo was a takeover target rather than a company setting its own price.

Is DoorDash listed in the UK? No, it trades on the Nasdaq in New York under DASH. When Deliveroo was delisted in October 2025 the London Stock Exchange lost another company, which is part of a pattern people in the City have been complaining about for a few years.

Do Deliveroo riders work for DoorDash now? Effectively yes, though they are self employed contractors rather than employees, which was true before the takeover too. DoorDash committed to honouring the existing GMB union agreement.

How do I check who owns a company myself? Search the name on Companies House and look at the persons with significant control register, which shows who ultimately controls it, and it is free. For a business like Deliveroo the chain runs through a US parent, so you will get to the top but it takes a few clicks.

Last checked 14 August 2026. If something here is out of date email alex@digitalhighstreett.com and I will fix it.