Someone on HN explained this very well recently: that food delivery is the perfect business for duping gullible investors, because you can book the entire cost

Someone on HN explained this very well recently: that food delivery is the perfect business for duping gullible investors, because you can book the entire cost of a meal as top-line revenue, even though it passes straight through you to the restaurant. So if someone orders $80 worth of food, that's $80 that you can show off on your Series B pitch deck even though your profit after delivery might be -$5. It's not even like the Uber theory of "we're spending to grow", it's "we're spending to make more money that isn't ours look like ours", with the losses expanding in lockstep. I agree that a major bust is incoming. Edit: "gullible" may not be the right word. It's more like this is a clever hack to exploit how tech investors are complacent about huge losses, as long as revenues are growing too. That's not inherently a bad thing, sometimes this approach is a good way to build out a healthy business. But the food delivery outfits are carefully exploiting this and hoping they get pattern-matched to other business models where it's OK, even though their situation is not the same at all.