Food Delivery

26/1156 → 8/1117; -1.53 percentage points of formation share.

What stands out in this cohort is not the delivery apps themselves but where the actual company-building energy has migrated: five of the eight, Chowdeck, beU delivery, Chow Central, FoodCourt, and Heyfood, are consumer delivery marketplaces built explicitly for African cities, while the other three, Sekilo, PoloTab, and Airgoods, are quietly building the unglamorous supply-side infrastructure underneath restaurants and grocers in Indonesia, Mexico, and the US. That split matters more than it looks, because the category's overall formation rate has cooled to 0.32x while the adjacent Supply Chain and Logistics formation is growing at 0.71x, more than double, suggesting the founders still entering this space are increasingly the Sekilo and Airgoods type rather than the Chowdeck type. The consumer apps themselves lean on a repeated claim, Heyfood's line that it profits on every delivery "from day 1" unlike DoorDash, which signals how thin margins have forced discipline that earlier, better-funded American delivery companies never had to learn. Underneath all of them sits the same operational crack: normal orders flow cleanly through point-of-sale and dispatch systems, but when something breaks, a late rider, a stockout, a bad batch of poultry, it gets patched over with phone calls and spreadsheets rather than software, exactly the kind of gap PoloTab and Sekilo are positioned to close. The timing lines up with the post-2022 maturing of mobile payments and smartphone penetration across Lagos, Jakarta, and Mexico City, which made it viable to run asset-light logistics and B2B distribution on phones in markets that couldn't support the capital-heavy delivery models Silicon Valley built a decade earlier.

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