Hurrier Acquired by German Company

Toronto-based food delivery startup Hurrier has been acquired by foodora, a Berlin-based online food ordering company.

“It’s definitely exciting for us,” says David Albert, foodora’s managing director in Canada.

The move, part of foodora’s global expansion plans, will allow the company to gain an existing customer base in Canada.

“There’s always the question of do you build it or buy it,” says Albert. “Hurrier really helped us to move faster in the Canadian space and they also had a great team and a lot of knowledge.”

While the acquisition took place in July, it was only announced on Sept. 17. Albert says the announcement was timed to coincide with a merger between foodora and Urban Taste, another German company with a similar business.

“I think we were mostly waiting for foodora to announce this new merger and the idea was to go to press with everything at the same time,” says Albert.

Urban Taste had been owned by by Delivery Hero, an international online food-ordering platform also based in Germany. Like Hurrier and foodora, Urban Taste was focused on delivering food from  higher-quality restaurants. Foodora and Delivery Hero also share the same majority shareholder, Rocket Internet.

“Rocket Internet is the biggest business incubator in the world, they have about 100 internet brands that sit under their umbrella, they’re a publicly-traded company in Germany,” says Albert. “They’ve done a lot in the food-delivery space.”

Foodora will continue to use the Hurrier brand in Canada and Albert says customers should see few changes.

“Hurrier had experienced a lot of success on their own,” Albert says.

He says the plan is to “take what Hurrier was already doing and inject a lot of resources plus know-how and try to build-up a household name in Canada.”

There has been one big change though – Hurrier, which had exclusively used bicycles, has started to also make deliveries using cars and motorcycles.

The announcement comes less than than a month after Hurrier revealed plans to expand into Vancouver and Montreal. Those plans remain unchanged.

Hurrier founder Adam Hasham will be staying at the company. He’ll join Albert as co-managing director of foodora’s Canadian operations.

The dollar value of the acquisition was not disclosed.