Everything we know about the DoorDash IPO filing

Dash over to the door of your stockbroker’s office, because DoorDash is going public.

According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents made public this morning, the food-delivery giant generated revenues of $1.9 billion in the first nine months of the year with a net loss of $149 million. In 2019, revenues were $885 million and net losses, $667 million.

“Consumer spending on restaurants and other consumer foodservices has moved in recent years towards off premise consumption, with the proportion of food consumed off-premise increasing from 44% of food and beverage spend in 2009 to 50%, or $302.6 billion, in 2019,” the prospectus says. “We believe that this off-premise opportunity will continue to grow. Fifty-eight percent of all adults and 70% of millennials say that they are more likely to have restaurant food delivered than they were two years ago, and we believe the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated these trends.”

DoorDash has applied to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DASH. Its private valuation is $16 billion.

Room to grow

That DoorDash wants to go public isn’t a surprise. In late February, it confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC.

The only major food-delivery company that’s publicly traded is Grubhub, which had its IPO in April 2014. Uber Eats, another big player in the sector, is part of Uber; Uber Eats launched in August 2014 and parent company Uber went public in May 2019.

In August 2019, DoorDash bought Caviar from Square for $410 million.

In its SEC filing, DoorDash outlined its plans to grow the business, such as recruiting more restaurants, offering more merchant services, attracting more consumers, increasing the number of times consumers order food through the platform, and improving operational efficiencies.

Under a prospectus heading called “Our Response to COVID-19,” DoorDash summaries its risk factors. The 16 bullet points that follow include a history of net losses, coupled with anticipated increasing expenses; the possibility that the company won’t be able to continue to grow “on pace with historical rates”; the fallout if delivery people (aka Dashers) are reclassified as employees under federal or state law; “intense” competition; and the ripple effects of COVID-19 or a similar public health crisis.

Pandemic bump

Potential COVID-related issues include the severity of travel restrictions, mandatory or voluntary business closures, and the impact on capital and financial markets.

“With the COVID-19 pandemic, we have experienced a significant increase in revenue, total orders, and Marketplace [gross order value] due to increased consumer demand for delivery, more merchants using our platform to facilitate both delivery and take-out, and improved efficiency of our local logistics platform,” the company writes. “The circumstances that have accelerated the growth of our business stemming from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may not continue in the future, and we expect the growth rates in revenue, total orders, and Marketplace GOV to decline in future periods.”

DoorDash says it’s been proactive during the pandemic by doing things like providing for no-contact delivery and providing Dashers with masks, hand sanitizer, and gloves in affected areas.

DoorDash boasts more than 18 million consumers, 390,000-plus merchants, and over one million Dashers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, according to its SEC filing. More than 900 million orders have completed since 2013, when several Stanford University students—including current CEO Tony Xu—founded the platform.