Delivery startup Postmates has raised $300 million in new venture funding led by Tiger Capital, bringing the total amount the company has raised to $578 million. Postmates is now a unicorn with a $1.2 billion valuation.
Fortune broke the funding story this morning, reporting that Postmates wasn’t looking for new money at the time, and that Tiger Capital approached them. The new funding will go towards accelerating the company’s growth in the U.S., and it will need it.
The cash infusion comes at a good time for Postmates, which now finds itself among a herd of unicorns in the delivery space. With today’s news, at least $1.2 billion in new funding has been poured to food delivery startups in 2018 alone: In March, DoorDash raised $535 million, only to raise another $250 million in August, valuing that company at $4 billion. Not to be left out, Instacart raised $150 million in April, valuing that delivery service at $4.35 billion.
This new funding is also a validation for Postmates, which earlier this year was rumored to be in merger talks with DoorDash to better take on giants such as Amazon, GrubHub and Uber Eats.
For those who have lived through previous startup bubbles and bursts, it’s easy to see the delivery space swelling to a dangerous size. But as we’ve seen, grocery and restaurant delivery have plenty of headroom to grow, and as the CEO of Ordermark (another delivery-driven company that recently raised new funding) recently told me “Convenience is not a trend.”