Oscar Pierre on Glovo’s Fight for Funding, Expansion and Sale to Delivery Hero

Glovo founder and CEO Oscar Pierre describes a company repeatedly close to running out of money before joining Delivery Hero. In this February 2025 interview, he tells Harry Stebbings about early financing, a pivotal McDonald’s partnership, international expansion and the sale. His views on the industry and regulation reflect his continuing role at Glovo.

Pierre studied aerospace engineering and joined Airbus, but quickly realized he did not want to work in a large corporation. Inspired by Uber’s launch in Atlanta and by his mother’s busy schedule, he imagined an app for errands: a courier could visit a shop, collect an item and bring it to the customer.

The initial concept seemed like a niche, high-end service. Then customers began asking for McDonald’s meals. Pierre saw an opportunity to combine a restaurant marketplace with delivery, opening up supply from restaurants that did not have their own couriers.

He had €10,000 and paid a developer roughly €8,000 for an initial app. It did not work well, but the mockups gave him something to show investors. The first financing raised €100,000 at a €280,000 pre-money valuation, implying €380,000 post-money; Pierre recalls that the early plan nevertheless projected a sustainable company.

The team hired its first CTO and rebuilt the app while taking orders through a website and messages. It took about a year to get traction and reach a subsequent round of roughly €1.5 million, Pierre says.

Customers liked the service, but early unit economics were deeply negative. Pierre does not consider that sufficient product-market fit: a service also needs a price customers will pay and a viable way to deliver it. As courier density improved, Glovo could gain efficiencies and earn more from merchant partners.

He says marketplace scale is national and local: brands and major partnerships can be countrywide, while logistics depend on density within cities. A strong brand in Spain does not automatically transfer across the border, so each new country requires another investment.

Milan worked well, but Pierre says Glovo entered Paris two or three years behind Deliveroo and Uber and never reached sustainable scale. He believes a strong number-two operator can be profitable, but says it must still be highly relevant in the market.

He estimates that entering Tunisia cost €5–10 million and took two to three years to become profitable. A company could target break-even sooner, he says, but might grow more slowly. The figures are his recollections for that market, not a universal expansion budget.

Scale improves the economics through courier availability and better estimates of restaurant preparation time. Every second matters: send a courier too late and food may be cold; send one too early and paid time is wasted.

Stebbings asks how models handle unpredictable events such as a new cook or rain. Pierre says weather data can help and restaurants also need simple tools to report delays or a temporarily busy kitchen. The service depends on combining data with real-world inputs.

Batching deliveries can improve efficiency but slow an individual order. Pierre says the company tries to measure how each additional minute affects retention and customer lifetime value, and balance those effects against delivery cost.

Pierre calls the McDonald’s partnership a turning point. He recalls that a global Uber Eats arrangement in 2018 threatened Glovo’s position in Spain, so he repeatedly traveled to Madrid to persuade a local decision-maker to give Glovo a trial.

The small team treated the pilot as existential, built requested features and prominently displayed the brand. Pierre says the deal brought many customers and was later replicated in Italy. He recalls that McDonald’s represented as much as 70% of Spanish volume at one point, a concentration he accepted while expecting customers to explore other merchants.

Fundraising remained difficult. Pierre says Glovo came close to running out of money at least three times and many European investors passed. His recollection is that he met or called roughly 100 investors while seeking a major round; the eventual cap table became fragmented.

He thinks he may have been too humble and transparent in pitches, while investors underestimated the team’s local execution with limited capital. He also found it difficult when investors who had not built companies added pressure during an already volatile operating journey.

He says Glovo raised as much as it could rather than choosing among many offers. At a Barcelona football event, he met Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani, who had noticed the couriers’ backpacks; Pierre recalls an investment of about €15 million as part of a round with other leads.

One lead investor later required a signed McDonald’s contract before closing. Pierre says the company had around three weeks of cash left and ultimately obtained the contract in time. He describes the process as one of several near-death moments.

Over seven years, he says, Glovo raised roughly every nine months because the competitive market kept demanding more spending even with negative unit economics. In another round a lead withdrew just before Christmas; an internal bridge gave the team a few more months to find a replacement.

A later €200 million round did not remove the pressure when the company was burning around €30 million a month. Pierre describes the tension between extending runway and spending enough to compete; those amounts are his recollections, not audited statements in the interview.

After Spain and Italy, Pierre looked for markets where rivals had not already established strong positions. Latin America was a natural direction for a Spanish team because of language and cultural connections. In Lima, he saw customers ordering and returning, restaurants joining and couriers becoming available.

He says courier acquisition was relatively inexpensive compared with ride-hailing and that the customer acquisition playbook was broadly transferable. Glovo used television as well as online advertising to generate downloads.

The company expanded across Latin America and explored markets including Kenya and Kazakhstan, sometimes against investor skepticism. For Pierre, the ratio between labor costs and average order value mattered more than the order value alone: it helped determine how affordable the service could be.

Brazil was a major mistake. Pierre estimates Glovo lost €30–40 million there after misjudging iFood, whose restaurant selection and service were stronger than expected. He says acquiring customers away from an established app required discounts that the thin-margin business could not sustain.

The team shut Brazil after roughly a year. Pierre says reversing the optimistic story he had sold to employees and investors was hard on his ego, and that about 100 employees lost their jobs despite doing good work in a difficult market.

He attributes investors’ concern partly to a burn rate that reached roughly €30 million per month, or about €1 million a day. He remembers checking the bank balance daily and watching it fall. Competition also encouraged expensive restaurant exclusivity deals, sometimes evaluated over three- to four-year paybacks.

The other concern was relative size. Even at €1–2 billion in top line, he says, Glovo was much smaller than some global rivals, which could spend heavily in its markets. His comparisons are approximate and reflect his recollection of the period.

Pierre says the leadership team revisits company values every year, refining their wording and discussing whether they still fit. Around 1,000 employees, he felt the culture lost intensity as growth moderated and he softened how directly he communicated expectations.

He recalls hearing an engineer say they had declined a competitor’s offer because the other company worked too hard. Pierre took that as a sign that Glovo might lose people who preferred a more demanding culture. That interpretation is his own, not evidence that one working style suits everyone.

He sought alignment from senior leaders, replaced some who did not share the direction and sent direct messages about the desired culture. He acknowledges that employees had not necessarily been told those expectations when recruited, so the shift created months of disagreement and departures.

Pierre now says expectations should be explicit in interviews, including long hours where required. He tries to use meetings to raise standards and increase speed. This is his preferred management style; Stebbings asks how a leader can remain direct while making talented people feel empowered.

During hypergrowth he spent much of his time fundraising, but after the acquisition and slower growth he felt he needed to inject energy into day-to-day management more actively. On layoffs, he argues that departing employees should be treated generously, both for their own sake and because colleagues watch how friends leave.

Pierre says he was too optimistic about acquisition upside and underestimated integrating technology, teams and cultures. He recalls buying two grocery marketplace businesses for roughly €5 million each, though he is unsure of the exact amounts; the distraction and integration work mattered as well as the price.

For market expansion versus more services in existing markets, he asks how time-sensitive the opportunity is and whether Glovo has a right to win. He says it can add categories in established markets later, whereas entering a new country ahead of competitors was a time-sensitive choice.

His playbook is to build restaurant delivery first and then expand into groceries, pharmacy and other items. He predicts the latter categories will eventually be larger. His projection that online grocery penetration in Spain could rise from roughly 2% to 20–30%, and that Glovo could capture a substantial share, is a company leader’s forecast, not an established outcome.

Pierre says an early acquisition offer was about €100 million when Glovo was only in Spain and Italy; he estimates he owned 25–30% then. He declined because he believed the company could expand much further, while acknowledging that the decision was not purely rational.

Delivery Hero had already invested in Glovo’s Series B, despite being a competitor in some markets. After a later round, Pierre and his CFO felt unable to face another stressful fundraise and considered both an IPO and a sale. The company was still losing around €1 million a day and was not profitable, he says.

Pierre says Delivery Hero was the best bidder for investors, the team and him because its model allowed local brands to continue operating with access to technology and capital. He describes the December 31, 2021 deal as an all-stock acquisition valued at 2.3 billion, without specifying a currency in his answer; the episode description separately states $2.2 billion.

Signing felt like completing part of the mission: returning money to investors while allowing Glovo to continue serving customers, couriers and restaurants. Stebbings speculates about Pierre’s personal proceeds; Pierre does not confirm an amount.

After speaking with other founders who had exited, Pierre decided he wanted to keep working. He says he finds happiness in solving problems with his team, while maintaining a life outside work. He remained at Glovo after the acquisition.

Pierre also co-founded Yellow, which he describes as a €30 million European venture fund investing in young founders. He had previously made angel investments and now spends a few hours a week with the fund. This investment role is relevant to his comments on founders and fundraising.

He warns first-time founders that venture investors often share information with one another, so conversations may travel beyond the immediate meeting. Stebbings adds that approaching investors too early can create misleading rumors about a fundraising process; both are describing their own experience.

Pierre says he still sees potential for Glovo to become ten times larger and mentions approaching €7 billion in top line. He says its most recent half-year was its first profitable semester. The interview does not define the profit measure, and his tenfold expectation is a forecast.

Both speakers see potential in advertising: Stebbings discloses that his past investment thesis included the possibility of subsidizing delivery with ads. Pierre says advertising generated roughly €2–3 per €100 of gross merchandise value and forecasts at least €5, describing advertising as nearly full margin. These are his company-level estimates and aspirations, not verified net profits.

He says reaching that advertising target requires broader merchant participation and better ad products. He would like to add Inditex brands and Mercadona to the marketplace, but says both prefer to control their own online experience.

Pierre recalls discussions about joining forces with Wolt, whose founder he admires, although their companies ultimately took different paths. He says they still compete in several markets.

On gig-economy regulation, Pierre says the sector needs rules, but describes major difficulty in Spain. He says prosecutors had sought a six-year prison sentence against him over the freelancer model, and says courts had previously validated that model. These are his account and legal position at the time; the interview does not establish a judgment or resolve the disputed issues.

Pierre alleges Spanish authorities pursued Glovo before US competitors and suggests the company’s size and visibility may explain the timing. That is his interpretation, not an established finding of selective enforcement. He is pessimistic about regulation becoming easier for the next generation of European founders.

He rejects the idea that European founders must move to Silicon Valley to build strong technology. He wishes someone had encouraged him to be more ambitious at the beginning, and believes a demanding culture can attract enough committed people in Europe.

In quick fire, he predicts on-demand delivery will extend well beyond meals and says he would like Glovo to overtake Uber Eats in Portugal. Both are aspirations and forecasts from a competing operator, not verified future outcomes.

Pierre praises an early investor who gave him room during stressful fundraising rather than repeatedly asking for updates. He recalls growing up with financial security and watching his father work late, and says that safety net helped him take risks while living with his parents in the company’s early years.

Asked what he would tell his younger self, he says to communicate transparently even when some listeners may dislike the message. Looking ahead, he hopes automation will remove unpleasant jobs, a prediction about the future rather than a demonstrated outcome for affected workers.