Glovo

Glovo was founded in Barcelona in 2015 by Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud with a simple but bold premise: deliver anything — food, medicine, groceries, flowers — in under 30 minutes. In a market just beginning to experiment with on-demand delivery, Glovo positioned itself as the European alternative to Deliveroo and UberEats, with a more flexible operational model and a deliberate focus on less contested geographies: Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Growth was fast. Glovo expanded to over 25 countries and more than 10 million active users, building a network of tens of thousands of restaurants and dark stores. Its q-commerce model — ultra-fast deliveries from dedicated warehouses — anticipated a trend that would go mainstream during the pandemic. By 2021, ahead of one of its largest funding rounds, Glovo reached a valuation of approximately $2.3 billion. In 2022, Delivery Hero — already a minority shareholder — completed a full acquisition, integrating Glovo into its global network. Glovo's story illustrates how a European startup can build a defensible market position in a hyper-competitive sector by targeting geographies overlooked by Anglo-American players and developing operational infrastructure that goes well beyond simple intermediation between users and restaurants.