Uber is shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly, three years after the cab-hailing company acquired it for $1.1 billion. Drizly ran independently all this time, and Uber eventually decided to close it, as first reported by Axios.
At the time of the acquisition Uber planned to integrate Drizly into Uber Eats, but never came around to do it. The company said that the Drizly brand will be discontinued by March 2024.
“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,” Pierre Dimitri Gore-Coty, SVP of Delivery at Uber, said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We’re grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the BevAlc delivery category as the original industry pioneer.”
In 2020, Drizly disclosed that it was affected by a data breach that affected 2.5 million customers. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered Drizly to delete all personal data that wasn’t required to provide service. Plus, it asked the alcohol delivery service and CEO James Cory to implement a robust security program.
The company aims the focus on alcohol delivery through Uber Eats, where it claims to have doubled the business in the category globally. Currently, Uber operates alcohol delivery through Uber Eats in 35 U.S. states and 25 countries across the globe.
In 2020, before the Drizly acquisition, Uber acquired Postmates for $2.65 billion in an all-stock deal.
Last year, Uber Eats started exploring chatbot-based features to let users find restaurant deals and reorder favorites. The company also started allowing users to order from two nearby stores at the same time.