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June 1, 2022

Wolt's acquisition by DoorDash is complete — but have investors lost out?

DoorDash's acquisition of Wolt for €7bn has now closed. But how much is Wolt really worth today — and what does that mean for investors?


Mimi Billing

2 min read

A Wolt driver

Today, the acquisition of Finnish food delivery startup Wolt by US-based DoorDash has finally completed. Due to legal and regulatory requirements, it has taken more than six months for the deal to close.

The news of the acquisition of Wolt, one of Europe's leading food delivery startups, by its US competitor DoorDash, first broke in November last year. The deal was valued at €7bn — one of the biggest exits in Finland for years.

And it wasn’t just a great exit for the founders, but also for the investors. EQT Ventures, which owned about 10% of the company, claimed that it made a 200x return on its first investment in Wolt.

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“The exit valuation at the time of this announcement represents an approximate 200x uplift compared to EQT Ventures’ initial investment in 2016, which we are pretty excited about,” EQT Ventures partner Lars Jörnow wrote on Medium at the time of the deal.

Other early investors such as the Nordic VC Inventure — which invested in 2014 — and later investors such as ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global,  83North, EQT Growth and Highland Europe, were probably also pretty pleased with the €7bn deal.

Wolt acquisition: Is the all-stock-transfer deal actually worth €7bn today?

The deal between Wolt and DoorDash was an all-stock transition, which means that the €7bn was paid in shares in DoorDash, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Since then, however, the stock market has crashed and most tech companies have been hit hard — including DoorDash.

Back in November, investors were promised a share price in DoorDash — as part of the transaction — valued at $206.45, according to EQT Ventures’ press release at the time.

Today, at the time of writing, those shares are each worth $73.63 — almost one-third of the value when the deal was made.

That means that the whole deal, if it was done to the valuation of DoorDash shares today, would only be worth €2.5bn. This is not, however, confirmed by any of the investors. And for many of them, what the shares in DoorDash are valued at today may not matter if the stock market manages to return to previous levels in the next six months.

Typically, investors are prohibited to sell their shares for six months after any all-stock transfer deal has closed. According to a Sifted source, however, that lock-up was pretty modest in this deal.

“It will be interesting to see how different investors do — who will try to sell off as much as they can as quickly as possible and who won't rock the boat,” one source with an insight into the deal tells Sifted.

Mimi Billing

Mimi Billing is a senior reporter at Sifted. She covers the Nordics and healthtech, and can be found on X and LinkedIn