Uber has decided to shut down Drizly just three years after acquiring the alcohol e-commerce delivery platform for $1.1 billion, Axios reported today.
Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Uber’s SVP of delivery, in a statement to Axios, said the company has decided to close Drizly in order to focus on its “core UberEats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything — from food to groceries to alcohol — on a single app.”
Drizly operated independently under the Uber family for three years, but there have been hints of integration into Uber’s core platform. Last May, Drizly made company-wide layoffs, affecting approximately 100 roles. The layoffs were part of a corporate restructure as Drizly officially began “integrating certain operations into Uber for a strategically aligned, centralized BevAlc vision,” the company told Brewbound at the time.
The layoffs followed a cybersecurity issue causing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to propose an order against Drizly and its CEO, James Cory Rellas, which determined Rellas and the company “failed to use appropriate information security practices to protect consumers’ personal information,” resulting in a data breach that affected 2.5 million users.
Uber acquired Drizly in early 2021 for $1.1 billion in cash and stock. Shortly after, Uber forged a partnership with Gopuff, an on-demand convenience delivery retailer, a move that drew scrutiny from the FTC over competition concerns. With no update on the FTC investigation since 2021, Uber merged Drizly and Gopuff’s resources. In January, the companies announced the addition of Gopuff’s warehouses and brick-and-mortar liquor retailers (Liquor Barn, acquired in 2021, and BevMo, acquired in 2020) to Drizly’s online marketplace in 26 states.
Drizly was founded in Boston in 2012 and launched its service in 2013.
Read more on Drizly:
- Drizly Employees Affected by ‘Layoff Tidal Wave’
- Gopuff to Expand Presence on Drizly
- Drizly Establishes ‘New Brand Direction’
- FTC Proposes Order Against Drizly and CEO for Data Security ‘Carelessness’
- Uber to Acquire Drizly for $1.1 Billion in Stock and Cash Deal
- Uber Completes $1.1 Billion Acquisition of Drizly
- Report: FTC Scrutinizing Uber’s Partnership with GoPuff, Deal with Drizly