About

What are the most important transactions, litigations or other major projects that you have been involved in during the last year?

Some of the most important milestones from last year include the Amazon investment followed by an 18 month Competition Markets Authority investigation. Our legal team also handled the series H funding round (pre IPO) and then the IPO. We also worked on the new rider law in Spain as well the industry rider reclassification in Italy.

Can you tell us a bit more about the IPO?

We prepared Deliveroo to IPO on the London Stock Exchange in a compressed timeline of six months. This was the largest tech company IPO on the London Stock Exchange. We managed it during extremely turbulent market conditions and became the first company in the UK to adopt a true dual class share structure.

This required us to obtain approval from the FCA, the Takeover Panel and HMRC. We were also the first company in the UK to allow our consumers and restaurant partners to participate in the IPO via a retail offer (through our app!). We also included our riders in our IPO to show our appreciation for their hard work.

What were the main difficulties your company faced during the initial Covid-19 lockdown?

At the beginning of lockdown, a large number of restaurants came off the platform. This was a huge problem as we do not have a business without restaurant partners! This was compounded by our Amazon funding being blocked by the Competition Markets Authority (CMA). This put the business in a precarious position for a period of time.

We had to work hard to ensure restaurants could re-open for delivery only and also work hard to have the CMA clear our deal with Amazon. Also as a business we had to think about the safety of our riders and consumers. We were the first platform to change our technology to enable contactless delivery. In addition, we had to think about how we could quickly expand the nature of the platform to assist with Covid-19. For example, how do we expand our grocery offering because people could not order online weekly shops for months at the beginning of the pandemic. This was especially difficult given that we were in the throes of a CMA investigation looking into Deliveroo and Amazon grocery offerings. We now work with major grocery partners including Aldi, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose with more than 4,600 stores across the UK including independent partners.

Team size: 50

Major legal advisers: Proskauer Rose