Drizly was purchased by the corporation for $1.1 billion.
In the year 2021, Uber made the decision to acquire Drizly for a price of $1.1 billion, shortly after the company announced that its food delivery division had managed to keep its losses under control throughout the pandemic. According to a report by Axios, the corporation has decided to terminate the alcohol delivery service that was based in the United States after three years. In an interview with the journal, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, the Senior Vice President of Delivery for Uber, stated that the firm has made the decision to shutter the operation in order to concentrate on its “core Uber Eats strategy.”
Drizly was defined as a service that “works with thousands of local merchants to provide consumers with an incredible selection of beer, wine, and spirits with competitive and transparent pricing” in the release that the SEC made regarding the acquisition of the company. Despite the fact that Uber incorporated Drizly’s services into its Eats app, the booze delivery business continued to operate under its own independent application.
“After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we’ve decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything — from food to groceries to alcohol — all on a single app,” Gore-Coty stated in a prepared statement. “We’re grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the BevAlc delivery category as the original industry pioneer.”
It is not apparent whether the cybersecurity concerns that Drizly was experiencing played a part in Uber’s decision. The information of 2.5 million consumers was exposed as a result of a data breach that Drizly has previously stated occurred in the year 2020. The Federal Trade Commission discovered, following Uber’s acquisition of Drizly, that the CEO of the firm, James Cory Rellas, had been informed of the security concerns of the company as far back as 2018. It was established by the agency that the delivery service had failed to adopt the appropriate protections to protect its users, despite the fact that it had claimed to have done so. Furthermore, the agency found that the delivery service’s weak security policies were the cause of the data breach. It issued an order to Drizly that it should destroy any personal data that it had obtained that was unrelated to the services that it offered and that it should abstain from collecting such data in the future. Additionally, the Federal Trade Commission mandated that Rellas set up information security policies at every company that he joined or formed in which he assumed the job of chief executive officer. It appears like Uber intends to continue delivering alcoholic beverages to its customers, despite the fact that Drizly has been discontinued.