Postmates recently raised $80M in a Series C round led by Tiger Global Management. The company now has a $400M valuation based on this current investment. As part of the deal, Lee Fixel, partner at Tiger Global, will be joining Postmates’ board of directors. This funding should help push them towards their ambitious goal of providing $1 deliveries in under an hour. Postmates is not yet profitable, but they expect to reach a total revenue of $100M for 2015. Their business model, which pairs up customer requests with local couriers who can make quick turnaround on deliveries, has faced some recent competition from Uber. A couple of months ago, Uber launched UberEATS in Chicago and New York City after testing it in Los Angeles and Barcelona. However, where UberEATS is focused primarily on food delivery, including tailored exclusive menus for UberEATS users, Postmates sees food delivery as more of a jumping off point. As an example of their goals beyond food delivery, Postmates recently formed a partnership with Apple to provide same day delivery of Macbooks and other Apple products to customers who purchase them online. In this case they actually beat out Uber for Apple’s business, which could be seen as a huge win. Currently, Postmates delivery fees average between $5-20 with the courier keeping the majority of the fees plus any tips they receive. The plan to lower fees to $1 would require batching deliveries to nearby locations together to lower costs.
