Europe's leading Founder Factory: How alumni of Delivery Hero and its European brands built 150 startups worth €7.5 billion

• Former employees of Delivery Hero and its European brands have founded more companies, and raised more venture capital, than the alumni of any other founder factory in Europe.
• Germany is at the centre of this impact, with Berlin-based startups accounting for €4.9 billion in combined enterprise value and about 3,700 of the 11,000 tech jobs created in Germany.
• A flywheel effect: alumni-founded startups are becoming founder factories in their own right, and over 30 Delivery Hero alumni are now investing in the next generation of European startups.

Berlin, October 6, 2026 — Delivery Hero has become Europe's leading founder factory. Alumni of the company and its European brands have gone on to launch 150 start-ups and build businesses worth a combined €7.5 billion – employing 11,000 people in Europe and beyond. The figures come from a new analysis published today by startup data platform Dealroom.co.

The data shows how Delivery Hero’s impact over its 15-year history has extended far beyond its own global operations, directly contributing to Europe’s economic prosperity as former employees have gone on to create new companies, jobs and investment across the European tech ecosystem.

Niklas Östberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Delivery Hero, said: "In the fifteen years since we founded Delivery Hero, we have proudly emerged as the leading network that feeds capital, founders, operators and experience back into the European ecosystem. I love to see that impact continue to grow. And I want to see the next generation of European founders have the same opportunity to build and scale here – Europe just needs to keep creating the conditions for that to happen.”

Yoram Wijngaarde, Founder and CEO of Dealroom.co, said: "The accumulation of talent in the European ecosystem is accelerating, as more founders and investors have experienced from the inside what it means to scale a globally leading company. Delivery Hero stands out as a central anchor in this network, which spans all over Europe."

Value created in Europe, anchored in Germany

Germany is at the centre of this impact. Berlin-based startups account for €4.9 billion of the network's €7.5 billion in combined enterprise value, while about 3,700 of the 11,000 jobs created are in Germany. 

While Delivery Hero is Germany's top founder factory by all key measures analyzed in the report, its impact reaches across all of its European operations. Beyond the Berlin headquarters, alumni of Delivery Hero brands have founded companies in every one of its European markets. 

foodora alone accounts for 49 startups founded across France, Spain, Scandinavia and Central Europe, worth a combined €2.3 billion, while former employees of Glovo have founded 35 start-ups, worth a combined €461 million.  

Capital and talent flowing back into the ecosystem

Delivery Hero’s impact on Europe’s tech ecosystem doesn’t stop there – it has also led to a second generation of founders, with alumni-founded companies from a diverse range of industries such as Gorillas, Kaia Health and Zenjob having become founder factories themselves. According to the report, people who worked at companies created by Delivery Hero alumni have themselves created around 80 further second-generation startups. 

Delivery Hero alumni are now investing in the next generation of companies too. More than 30 people who worked at Delivery Hero have moved into venture capital by founding or becoming partners at over 35 investment firms. Those firms have raised €7.3 billion in new funds since 2020 and have participated in more than 2,300 funding rounds over the same period, representing more than €79 billion in total deal volume. Since 2017, Delivery Hero alumni startups have recorded an average of two exits per year. 

Europe's next opportunity

As the Dealroom.co analysis shows, businesses like Delivery Hero that were born and grown in Europe are helping fuel the continent's ecosystem. And that effect is compounding. For Delivery Hero, collaboration between businesses and policymakers is important, and there is an opportunity to do even better. Policymakers can cut regulatory complexity, build a true single market, and deepen capital markets so European startups can scale at home. Meanwhile, scaleups like Delivery Hero bring operating experience, ambition and a network that startups can draw on. 

Together, effects give Europe the chance to keep nurturing a unique startup environment with enormous socio-economic potential: high-quality jobs, and talent and technology grown in Europe – but built for global reach.

Access the full report on the Dealroom website.

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NOTES TO EDITORS

Key findings:

• 150 startups founded by current and former employees of Delivery Hero's Berlin HQ and its six European brands;  more than any other founder factory in Europe, spread across more than 50 hubs worldwide
• €7.5B combined enterprise value, four times the 2020 figure
• €4.4B raised in venture capital, the largest total of any European founder factory
• 11,000 jobs created globally, up 1.7x since 2021
• €7.3B raised in new funds since 2020 by the 35+ investment firms that Delivery Hero alumni have founded or joined as partners — capital now being deployed back into European companies
• ~80 second-generation startups founded by people who worked at companies created by Delivery Hero alumni.

Scope: 

The report covers alumni of Delivery Hero's Berlin headquarters and its six brands with European operations: efood, foodora, foodpanda, foody, Glovo, and Yemeksepeti. Only the European operations of foodpanda are included. While most of these brands joined Delivery Hero more than a decade ago – some at a very early stage in their own startup lifecycle – the analysis includes startups founded by alumni of Delivery Hero’s brands who left before the respective brand was acquired by Delivery Hero. For consistency in benchmarking, this methodology was applied to all companies analyzed as part of the report. This differs from the Accel and Dealroom Founder Factories series that counts alumni of any named brand only. 

Methodology: 

A startup counts as an alumni startup if a founder held a full-time role at Delivery Hero or one of its European brands for more than five months and founded the company within six years of leaving. Each company must have at least two employees. Agencies, consultancies, mature companies and companies founded by former interns or advisers are excluded. This methodology has been defined in the Accel and Dealroom Founder Factories report series, which launched in 2022. Data was compiled by Dealroom.co in September 2026.

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ABOUT DELIVERY HERO

Delivery Hero is the world’s leading local delivery platform, operating its service in around 65 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The Company started as a food delivery service in 2011 and today runs its own delivery platform on four continents. Additionally, Delivery Hero is pioneering quick commerce, the next generation of e-commerce, aiming to bring groceries and household goods to customers in under one hour and often in 20 to 30 minutes. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Delivery Hero has been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2017 and is part of the MDAX stock market index. For more information, please visit www.deliveryhero.com

MEDIA CONTACT

Corporate & Financial Communications

press@deliveryhero.com

INVESTOR RELATIONS CONTACT

Investor Relations

ir@deliveryhero.com 

ABOUT DEALROOM

Dealroom.co is a global intelligence platform for discovering and tracking the most promising companies, technologies and ecosystems. Clients include many of the world’s foremost organisations such as Sequoia, Accel, Index Ventures, McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, Google, AWS, Microsoft, and Stripe.

Dealroom partners closely with local tech ecosystem development agencies and enablers, to create a comprehensive multi-dimensional blueprint of the tech ecosystem, including capital, talent, innovation, entrepreneurship and overall economic dynamism.