Uber reached an agreement on July 16, 2026, to acquire Delivery Hero, the Berlin-based food delivery company, in a deal valuing it at $14.8bn (£11bn / €12.9bn). The transaction is structured as a public takeover offer under German law, meaning Uber is making a direct offer to all Delivery Hero shareholders to buy their shares. If completed, the deal would combine Uber Eats with Delivery Hero's brands across 99 countries (The Guardian).

Uber offered €41.50 per Delivery Hero share, equivalent to about $47.58 in USD at the time. Uber had already bought roughly 25% of Delivery Hero's shares in earlier purchases, including a tranche acquired in May that brought its ownership to 19.5% of the company's issued capital. For the remaining shares, Uber will pay $13.7bn. Prosus, a major technology investor holding a 17% stake in Delivery Hero, committed to sell its shares to Uber. Delivery Hero's board and executives unanimously supported the takeover and plan to recommend it to their shareholders. Kristin Skogen Lund, chair of Delivery Hero's supervisory board, oversaw the agreement. Delivery Hero had confirmed it was in advanced negotiations on July 14, 2026, then published its own press release confirming the deal on July 16 (The Guardian; Delivery Hero Newsroom).

The combined Uber-Delivery Hero business handled $236bn in orders in 2025. After the deal, Uber will offer ride-hailing and food delivery in 58 markets, up from 34 today. Uber noted that customers who use both its ride-hailing and food delivery services tend to spend three times more on its app. Delivery Hero's portfolio includes foodpanda in Asia, PedidosYa in Latin America, and talabat in the Middle East.

To address competition concerns, Uber will not acquire Delivery Hero's operations in 14 countries where Uber already has a strong presence. Think of it like a store merger where regulators say you cannot own both shops on the same street, so you sell one to a different buyer. The excluded operations include Glovo in Portugal and Spain, foodora in Norway and Sweden, and Yemeksepeti in Turkey. SSW Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, will buy these excluded operations for $1.6bn. Delivery Hero does not operate in the UK.

Uber committed to keeping Delivery Hero's headquarters in Berlin and making no workforce changes until at least 2029. The company also pledged to invest €2bn in Germany over the five years following the deal. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2027.

The broader context here is one of sustained consolidation in the global food delivery sector, where companies compete on scale because larger order volumes directly improve per-order profitability. By absorbing Delivery Hero's regional brands, Uber extends its logistics network across Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The SSW Partners carve-out functions as a practical antitrust remedy, meaning a step taken to satisfy regulators who review whether a merger would overly reduce competition. In this case, Uber is isolating the 14 overlapping European and Turkish markets and selling them off.

The strategy behind the deal also rests on what the industry calls a super-app model, where a single platform offers multiple services so that users spend more time and money within one app. Uber's claim that dual-users of ride-hailing and food delivery spend three times more suggests the company is prioritizing higher lifetime customer value over simple geographic expansion. Keeping Delivery Hero's Berlin headquarters and freezing workforce changes until 2029 signals a deliberate effort to secure regulatory and political goodwill in Germany.

Regulatory scrutiny will likely focus on market concentration thresholds across the 99-country footprint, even with the 14-market carve-out. The deal also builds on a prior regional transaction: Uber Eats previously acquired Delivery Hero's foodpanda business in Taiwan for $950 million in cash in May 2024, separate from this acquisition. Closing the global deal will require navigating antitrust reviews across multiple jurisdictions, which is standard for mergers of this scale.