Food delivery services have been booming for the past couple of years, and many players are trying their luck in what is becoming a quite crowded market in Germany. With the most recent acquisition Takeaway.com, an originally Dutch company active in Germany with daughter Lieferservice.de, has bought its competitor Lieferando. Takeaway is planning on merging the two brands, which brand will disappear however, remains to be seen. “Lieferando is an extraordinary successful business with the best product in the market. Together our goal is not only to become the market leader in Germany and Poland, but to build up the biggest online food ordering platform worldwide”, says Takeaway-founder Jitse Groen.

A consolidation has been rumored by industry experts over the past few months as the market for online food delivery is getting more and more dense. The high number of competitors was inevitably leading to acquisition proposals. The German press has been speculating that Lieferando shareholders will have fetched a price of over EUR 50million from Takeaway. Delivery Hero, who was also said to be in the race for Lieferando, apparently backed out of the deal unwilling to pay a price of this dimensions.

In the course of the completion of the deal, existing investors Prime Ventures and Macquarie Capital, the investment arm of the Australian investment bank renowned for its infrastructure investments, without hesitation injected another EUR 74million into the newly consolidated business. The investment is supposed to provide enough leeway to become #1 in the Germany online food delivery market.

Lieferando was founded in 2009 by Christoph Gerber, Jörg Gerbig and Kai Hansen and was backed by early-stage incubator Rheingau Ventures. In the past years, the company has raised more than EUR 20million from investors like DuMont Venture, Macquarie and the KfW and attracted media attention through massive tv-advertising. Lieferando’s management team will be given senior executive positions in Takeaway.com. That’s the way to merge two profitable and fast-growing companies and keeping everybody happy. At least for now…