U.S. President Trump’s wide-ranging tariff hikes are already resulting in growth forecasts being cut amid other uncertainty — actions that will inevitably impact the technology sector, too. Today, however, one food e-commerce startup, GrubMarket, is announcing a new equity round of $50 million on a raised valuation of over $3.5 billion — a signal of how some are not slowing down their plans.
Liberty Street Funds, 3Spoke Capital, Pinegrove Capital Partners, ROC Venture Group, Portfolia, Pegasus Tech Ventures and Joseph Stone Capital are investing in this round, a Series G, along with other unnamed backers.
In a food distribution market estimated to be worth some $1 trillion annually, the company’s valuation has been on a swift upswing on the back of its growing balance sheet.
The last round we covered was a Series E in 2021, when GrubMarket raised $120 million at a $1.2 billion valuation; a year later, per PitchBook, it raised a Series F of $120 million at a $2 billion valuation. (Note: the Series G detailed in PitchBook from last year is incorrect.) Other investors in the company have included Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Battery Ventures, and many more (it has a cap table with more than 100 names on PitchBook.)
This latest round values GrubMarket at over $3.5 billion.
GrubMarket itself is a huge food distribution business, but in the case of this equity fund raise, the money will go towards building more technology to improve how its customers can manage their businesses, with — you guessed it — a particular emphasis on AI to help customers that have to process a lot of data, much of it through a mix of offline formats including voice mails and post-it notes.
We understand that GrubMarket is on track right now to make $2.4 billion in revenues this year (they were $2 billion in 2024), and CEO and founder Mike Xu said in an interview that it is profitable on an Ebitda basis. And so, with the food e-commerce world consolidating, GrubMarket will be using some of its cash on hand to make more acquisitions, both of startups and more legacy businesses.
“As GrubMarket grows bigger, we have a chance to deal with bigger acquisitions,” he said. “The industry always has had all sizes of wholesales and distributors and they need an exit when the owners get older or they want to embrace new technology and they make changes as a result.”
Food is of course a basic necessity, but in rich nations like the United States, thanks to the massive boost of commercialisation through channels like social media and TV, it’s also a pastime and major fixation.
Companies that can square that demand with supply and strong unit economics can make a killing.
GrubMarket made its name originally as a healthy food procurement and distribution startup, taking a tech-first approach to work with disparate groups of farmers and other producers and get their goods to buyers, which were mostly small retailers and a few giants like Whole Foods.
Over time, it beefed up its food distribution business further — seeing a bump in trade especially during the peak of the Covid-19 years — which led to its revenues and valuation climbing higher and higher. More recently, it has started to scoop up a variety of other sometimes-struggling food distribution startups like Good Eggs to build its profile up in delivering direct to consumers.
(And its cost cutting and consolidation seems to work: Good Eggs was at the end of its runway with all options exhausted when GrubMarket bought it; today, it is profitable, Xu told TechCrunch.)
Now with some 12,000 employees, GrubMarket is also spreading its wings, taking its technology and business model to more countries. Now, in addition to being active across all of the U.S., it has a presence in Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, India, Mexico, South Africa, and Spain, and it plans to go further. It says its procurement and distribution network covers some 70 countries in all.
For now at least, Xu is pretty sanguine, or at least holding comment, on what the impact of Trump’s tariffs will be on his business and that of the wider global network for food distribution. There are clear implications in the form of higher prices, possible supplier collapses, a drop in demand.
But as little has gone into effect so far that directly impacts logistics and tariffs on the produce and other food that GrubMarket trades in, for now it’s business as usual for the company, he said.
In the meantime, Xu is focusing on AI and other technology, which he believes will be a cornerstone of any version of his industry — big or small, flush or struggling — in the 21st century.
He said that in the last year, GrubMarket released “really comprehensive” enterprise AI software for the food supply chain industry. It includes components that provide business intelligence, an AI analyst to help its customers plan and manage their cash flow, and a third that essentially is an ordering assistant.
The third of these really taps into how the food supply industry sits across different modalities. Producers, wholesalers and other distributors and logistics companies sit on a tremendous amount of data, but a large part of it is still coming through unstructured and very offline modes: voice mail messages, scraps of paper, text messages across lots of platforms.
The AI assistant’s aim is to read whatever is coming in an get it into a common format to be used throughout the rest of the system. Xu said that a number of the components have patents or filed applications, underscoring the seriousness of this in the business.
Xu would not be drawn out on what its next steps might be, and whether that could include a public listing. The market these days seems in any case to be open to just as many scaled-up startups staying private and easing into quasi-private-equity arrangements or buying back their shares as they are seeing them list in IPOs.
“GrubMarket has rapidly grown into a major food technology company by leveraging best-in-class AI-powered software solutions and strong operational discipline. The company’s growth and scale are supported by established business fundamentals and a commitment to sustainability, benefiting farmers in California and across the U.S.,” said Kevin Moss, president of The Private Shares Fund and MD of Liberty Street Advisors, in a statement. “Through persistent innovation in AI enterprise solutions, vertical SaaS operational software, and its eCommerce platform and ecosystem, GrubMarket has become a pioneer in transforming the trillion-dollar American food supply chain industry.”
