Ex-Deliveroo execs’ food-ordering firm shutters

Gobble, a group-buying food-ordering platform co-founded by former Deliveroo executives, is shutting its doors after operating in Singapore for about one and a half years.

The Gobble team/ Photo credit: Gobble

Gobble let users view and select what their friends have ordered instead of scrolling through delivery apps.

The company’s group-ordering and food-gifting features were meant to tackle reduced social interaction among university students. Users could also create a “Gobble party” and invite friends to buy discounted meals as a group.

Its co-founder Domenico Tan shared on LinkedIn that Gobble’s B2C model “wasn’t sustainable” for it to have survived long. The executive also shared that even with Gobble’s high sales volume, margins were still too low.

“Ultimately, it came down to a simple math, we failed to show a quick enough path to positive cashflow,” Tan said. Gobble didn’t generate enough revenue for the company to raise series A funding.

Tan’s co-founder Ashwin Purushottam said the Gobble team grew the company to log US$340,000 in annual net sales at a 47% compound monthly growth rate but failed to show a “quick enough path” to positive cash flow.

“Running a group-buying marketplace in a space such as food-ordering, which has seen an onslaught of disappointing IPOs, set an unfortunate precedent for our next fundraise,” Purushottam notes.

In February 2022, Gobble secured US$1.3 million in a seed round led by Beenext and Flash Ventures.

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