DoorDash Aktie

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us, and welcome to the DoorDash Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the call over to Weston Twigg. Please go ahead.

All right. Thank you, Dustin. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our Q3 2026 earnings call. I'm pleased to be joined today by Co-Founder, Chair and CEO, Tony Xu; and CFO, Ravi Inukonda.

We'll be making forward-looking statements during today's call, including, without limitation, our expectations for our business, financial position, operating performance, profitability, our guidance, strategies, capital allocation approach and the broader economic environment. When we -- we will also be making forward-looking statements about our pending acquisition of Instacart, including, without limitation, the expected timing and likelihood of completion of the acquisition and our plans, objectives, intentions and expectations with respect to the acquisition and the combined company.

Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Many of these uncertainties are described in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events or performance. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures may be found in our earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.doordash.com. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results and are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Finally, this call is being audio webcasted on our Investor Relations website. An audio replay of the call will be available on our website shortly after the call ends. Operator, I'll pass it back to you, and we can take our first question.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with Citizens Bank.

Tony, you laid out a pretty compelling case in terms of adding additional demand to DashMarts. Can you just flesh that out, help us understand what your vision is for DashMarts and how Instacart plays into that?

Yes. I mean if you think about where grocery delivery is, it really is just a fraction of what its potential could be. And I think the reason I said this quite a lot in the past that the product really isn't there yet. Customers today are still being asked to pay a premium for imperfect delivery. So the question is, how can we actually ensure that we offer perfect deliveries at the most affordable prices? And the way I think about this is it really is a sequencing road map. And our journey really started 5 years ago when we began our own work in new verticals, and it's been a very successful endeavor. As part of that journey, we recognized that in order to offer the best possible service at the most affordable prices, we really needed to manage the inventory because stockouts were a key issue.

And when you look at, for example, the deliveries that we fulfill from DashMarts versus the delivery that we do third party, even though we have best-in-class logistics operations quality in the third-party stores, we are near perfect in our deliveries with DashMarts, but we're only in the low 90s in terms of our accuracy through the third-party stores. So there's a meaningful gap, but we've been able to prove demonstrably that we can close it both first by holding our own inventory and now actually managing thousands of items for fantastic retail partners like Giant Eagle or Albertsons and many others.

But when you think about this business, it's a fixed-cost business when you're managing inventory. So scale is really helpful. And when I think about today's news in partnering with Instacart and the fact that they have unique demand or orders that are unique to our network, that not only helps certainly, on a day 1 scenario post-close, where the added density in the last-mile network brings fulfillment efficiencies to offer faster delivery as well as lower cost throughout the system, but it allows us to continue to invest on our end state journey of building what we believe will be the best-in-class product for all retailers to be able to compete against the world's biggest companies.

And that will enable faster delivery and that will enable more affordable prices, which in turn will generate more sales for every grocer and retailer and more earnings opportunity for every shopper.

Our next question comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria from Wolfe.

Okay. Let me try two, please. One is you talked in your release and letter that you expect multiyear path to $500 million or more in annual synergies net of investments. Could you please talk about where those synergies will be coming from? And where do you expect to invest? In year 1, over 100% of total synergies will be invested. So could you please talk about how do you see that play out?

And then second, on DoorDash's core business, U.S. marketplace GOV accelerated on tougher comps, which is impressive. And I guess you talked to rise in frequency as well as new consumers ordering. Could you please talk to that a little bit more? How do you see demand trend? And what going forward will drive organic U.S. market -- restaurant marketplace growth?

Shweta, it's Ravi. Look, I mean, I'll take both of them, and Tony, feel free to chime in. Look, I mean, I think there's an opportunity, Shweta, for us to build a really large and attractive business, right? If you think about synergies, which is the part of your question, there's a number of big blocks that you could think about.

Let's start with the growth ones first. Look, there's an opportunity for us to cross-list merchants. For example, there's categories that are not available on both platforms. There's a clear opportunity for us to be able to cross-list them, which drives growth. One of the clearest examples is we are going to be able to list our restaurants platform on Instacart, which is going to drive top line growth.

Second, I would talk about is just purely ads. CPG advertisers will now have more consumers to reach, which will not only drive quality, but also higher ad spend, which will in turn drive more ROAS. The third one that I would think about is there is an opportunity for us to cross-sell products. Instacart has built a really strong first-party software infrastructure, which we can now cross-sell to grocers on our platform as well as Tony touched on DashMart Fulfillment Services. It's going to be an opportunity for us to make that available to more customers across both platforms.

Look, I mean, on the efficiency side, Dasher density, shopper density is going to be pretty critical. As you increase the volume, that's going to drive efficiency in the fulfillment network. And finally, if you look up and down the P&L, there's a number of opportunities, whether it's opportunities on sales and marketing opportunities on support. There's many opportunities that we could jointly work on together. And we thought about the opportunities that can jointly arise from combining both platforms.

One thing that's pretty clear is putting both platforms together will actually rise to leading in growth as well as increasing in overall profit dollar production. The key for us, however, is how do you take some of the profit dollars and reinvest that back in the business to ultimately build a better product for consumers as well as grocers. Look, that's historically what we've done.

And to the second point in your question, which is what's driving the growth in the core marketplace. Largely because of the reinvestment back in the product, our playbook is going to be very similar here. You can see examples from that in our acquisition of Deliveroo as well, where we've reinvested back in the product to ultimately drive the growth that you're seeing in the business. In fact, when I look at the new verticals platform, our core business is doing really well. That's growing quite nicely. We've become volume share leaders. We've continued to improve the customer outcomes, whether it's increase in order rate, increase in order frequency, the basket sizes are growing.

So the way we think about this is this is actually an accelerant to our core business, which continues to do well. And the other side, which is the core business continues to do well, which gives us, a, the conviction and the capacity to be able to do more. So if you're thinking about it from a modeling perspective, the way I would think about the model is year 1 is going to be the investments that we'll make to build a better product. Year 2, we'll make progress. And finally, in year 3, my expectation is we'll drive $500 million of incremental synergies to the bottom line that is net of the investments that we plan to make.

On the second one, look, I mean, you're right. I mean, the core business is doing really well. It's firing on all cylinders, right? If you look at the growth that we're seeing in the business, Q3, our restaurant business actually accelerated from Q2 to Q3. In fact, when you look at the sequential growth rate in Q3, it's the fastest we've seen in the last 5-plus years. New verticals continues to grow, both Wolt as well as Deliveroo, they also accelerated from Q2 to Q3. But more broadly, when you look at our overall U.S. restaurant growth, it's been stable actually for the last 4 years. A lot of that has got to do with the underlying improvements in the product.

We've invested back in selection. We've made subscription better. Overall paid subscribers continue to set all-time records. The combination of the work that we've done in improving the product while continuing to drive subscription is what you're seeing in terms of the growth that you're seeing in the business. And again, the growth is coming from sustainable levers, which is user growth, subscription growth. And the way at least I think about it from a mental model perspective is these are compounding growth that will come in the future, which gives us a lot more confidence as we look ahead into what we can drive in terms of both growth as well as profit dollar production for the next several years.

Our next question comes from the line of Deepak Mathivanan from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Great. Tony, so on the acquisition of Instacart, can you talk about why now is the right time? I mean your grocery business is strong, and you have most of the retail partners, too. DashMart is offering a very differentiated value prop to retailers. Can you talk about why now is the right time?

And then also a second one, a high-level strategy question on AI agents. How much of the agentic experience, specifically for food use case, be it grocery delivery or food delivery or maybe meal planning and others, do you want Dash to kind of directly power for consumers with ceding some of that to more generic agents like Muse. Or maybe asked another way, should we expect Dash to have its own set of personal agents, specifically catered for food use cases for consumers? How should we think about that?

Yes. Deepak, I'll take both of those. On the first question about why now. I mean, it's a great question because M&A is very, very hard to do successfully. And so we always take these decisions extremely seriously. I would say the first thing is our core business is doing really, really, really well. Ravi touched upon a bit of this. And as you can see in the results that we just published this morning on the quarter, I mean, record highs in top line, bottom line, accelerating growth in the U.S. restaurants business, continued fast growth on new verticals, accelerating growth in our international properties.

You continue to see product innovation from us. For example, our most recent Dash Forward event with the announcements of DoorDash Air, DashOS and merchant software as well as, speaking of AI agents, updates to our own AI agents. So the core business is truly firing on all cylinders.

I would say the second thing is our big projects for the year are on track. Obviously, the year is not over. But if you look at the projects around building a single tech stack, if you look at the projects around integrating Deliveroo and the -- some of the results kind of speak for themselves. We're seeing customer benefits already from the single tech stack work, whether it's faster onboarding of merchants, better conversion from improved search, better SLAs for support across all audiences. These are just some of the ones that come top of mind.

If you look at the ROO side, we grew in Q3 at twice the rate that we did a year ago before we acquired the business. So all of the big projects we had for the year were projects that are doing really, really well. And so from a management bandwidth perspective and a sequencing perspective, we felt like we had the space to do something offensive. And this is a space we understand really well, the grocery marketplace space, both because we built our own grocery marketplace very successfully to your -- to the premise of your question, as well as the fact that we've integrated other marketplaces very successfully into the DoorDash family, whether it's Wolt, whether it's Deliveroo, whether it's actually even thinking about how we've reinvested over the years back into product innovation and driving durable growth for our own U.S. restaurant marketplace.

I think those would be all 3 demonstrable examples of our understanding of how to run a marketplace at scale, both driving top line growth durably, but also generating long-term total profit dollars. And that's what we intend to do here and play offense.

When I think about Instacart, I talked a little bit about how it feeds us on the journey towards building this end state, which is being able to manage inventory on behalf of every retailer of every size. But when I think about this, this really is about giving every retailer of every size the ability to compete in a world where technology is only accelerating faster, disruption is happening more quickly and the world's biggest companies are becoming larger.

And when I think about the capabilities that the combined companies will have, we will have best-in-class software to help each one of these grocers. That's something that Instacart has done a fantastic job building over a decade in helping grocers build their first-party online channels. You combine that with our first-party logistics capabilities, which we pioneered with DoorDash Drive also over a decade ago, and you can offer merchants the ability to build the best-in-class first-party experience for fast delivery, their own loyalty programs, their own data, their own customers. Then you look at the third-party side of the house, the combined marketplace and the combined reach gives every grocer higher quality orders, faster delivery, which is going to generate more sales. And so I think it was just the time to play offense. And you're right. I mean, everything is going great with the core business. This only adds to it.

Your second question was around AI agents. I would say that this is something that is still a very dynamic area. And my take on all things technology is you never want to fight gravity. But at the same time, you don't want to be delusional. What I mean by that is if you look at where AI agents are today, we're seeing maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these third-party agents, some of which you've cited in terms of whether or not customers are placing orders. And I think it's because they still largely view these third-party assistants, not necessarily for what I call these easier tasks, whether it's ordering food, like you said. The predominant use case of that is actually through our app.

And what we've been doing is actually in learning with some of these third parties what are the features that actually drive incremental orders, in which case we can build a very healthy partnership with some of these third-party assistants. But then what are the features that actually just make the DoorDash app and our own AI agents, whether it's DoorDash Ask (sic) [Ask DoorDash], the Text DoorDash which is something that we released recently, our MCP that we've been giving to third parties to use for things like corporate lunch orders, things like this to just make our app easier to use.

And I think that is the win-win of what we've been able to see where the volumes are very low, as I kind of cited. But I do believe there's a path in which you can get incremental orders and allow customers to order the way that they want to order, especially for long-consideration purchases or purchases they're not even thinking about that might be proactively made on their behalf. But for -- the everyday ordering, what we see is people come to DoorDash and they come back to DoorDash. It's easy to use. We're making it easier to use, and we expect to continue to do so.

Deepak, going back to your first question, right, I'll just reiterate one point. Look, I mean, you're absolutely right. Our core business on new verticals is doing really well, right? Look, we've been operating this business for the last 5 years, a lot of performance that we've demonstrated over the last 5 years. If you look at the performance of that business, that business is growing really fast. When I look at the cohorts, MAUs are increasing, basket size is increasing, people are using us for different use cases. We actually think the combination is truly going to be an accelerant for us. We talked about efficiency. A couple of calls ago, I mentioned that the overall new vertical portfolio is going to be gross profit positive by the end of the year. We're pretty close to doing that. We're pretty close to being breakeven on a gross profit level. So the combination of both Instacart and us actually adds to that vision. So we're doing it from a position of strength, the way we think about it.

Our next question comes from the line of Nikhil Devnani from Bernstein.

Maybe just a follow-up to what you were just talking about, Ravi. I guess, have you found the organic effort in the category to be harder than you initially expected when it comes to building wallet share or recurring habitual behavior around grocery? I appreciate that the growth has been quite strong, but I'm just wondering the extent to which you feel Instacart might help with some of the more challenging aspects of the build-out.

And then maybe a related question on the deal is just given the replatforming and integration exercise you're going through this year for the other assets, how does that help your overall integration ability and sort of the speed at which you can move with this deal once it eventually closes?

Yes. Nikhil, I'll take the first one. Look, I mean, I think quite the contrary, right? Like actually, in my answer to Deepak's question, I talked about what we're seeing from an underlying cohort perspective, right? The way at least we run the business is ultimately, it's a cohort business. I look at the historic cohorts to see what the behavior of the future cohorts is going to be.

When I look at mature cohorts, the behavior that we're seeing is people are using us more, more of those cohorts are coming back, which tells me that the product has gotten better, people are getting habituated to the product. Their basket sizes are increasing. Their engagement on the platform is increasing. And that is now starting to translate into newer cohorts as well, where we're seeing similar signs of strength in the newer cohorts. That to me truly is what we think is actually going to happen in the overall business as well as you continue to add more and more newer cohorts.

Our goal has been, how do you continue to improve the product? Whether it's adding more selection. Look, we just added Costco on the platform, which is off to a great start. We've increased the quality of the platform. Overall, more number of DashPass subscribers are continuing to use categories outside of the core restaurants, and that number continues to grow. All of this gives us confidence that people are using the product more. They're engaging with us even more, which is also driving some of the efficiencies that I talked about, right? As we continue to scale that platform, we're seeing efficiency gains also come back and benefit the overall platform, which we are reinvesting back in the business.

To us, the combination of both Instacart and us is actually going to accelerate this vision. And the simple mental model that we have is, look, when you put both companies together, there's an obvious opportunity in driving both higher top line growth as well as higher profit dollar production. On top of that, we're going to have synergies. Our goal is how do you take a portion of that, reinvest that back in the business historically, like we've done with Deliveroo, like we've done with our core restaurant business, which is what's driving the stable growth, and use that to ultimately drive a better product, which, in fact, will drive more growth over the longer term as well as get the customers to adopt a better product.

Nikhil, I'll just add a little bit to that before I talk about your question on the integration of the tech stacks. To get, I guess, one level deeper, a lot of what I think about here is actually how can we actually help improve the Instacart business as well as how can they help improve ours. And it's -- actually, I think that because of the success we've seen in running our marketplace as well as the marketplaces, as I've mentioned, of the ones we've integrated as well as how we've reinvested back into the U.S. restaurants marketplace and some of the things we've learned on how to do that, I think we'll actually be able to reaccelerate the Instacart marketplace. And I actually think that they'll help us grow a lot of the first-party software products for grocers and retailers, something that they started ahead of us, whereas we kind of focused on first-party on the restaurant front.

And so I actually think that it's quite a nice mutual combination here where you're bringing the best of both, where on the DoorDash side, the best-in-class understanding of logistics operations, how to manage the marketplace to total profit dollars, how to generate product innovation in a continuous way. And then on the Instacart side, the best-in-class tools for -- software tools for grocers and their own online channels.

Your second question was around tech stack. I'm glad you asked it. So I mean, this is a huge endeavor for us, and I actually don't even think most people appreciate how big of a deal it is because we're not only trying to get all of our features into one tech stack, which means that we ship, once we ship, everywhere. But we're actually building new infrastructure, like actually new infrastructure to run core DoorDash, which will make any future integration much easier to run because it will just kind of work out of the box. So it will actually speed things up quite a bit. And that's why we decided to undertake such a large investment, both in terms of dollars as well as people, I mean, literally rebuilding this airplane as we're flying it part by part, engine by engine. And so it will actually speed things up in the future.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Morton from MoffettNathanson.

One for Tony and then one for Ravi. Tony, I was curious to how you expect this deal to be perceived by your grocery customers. Will it land with them that DoorDash is becoming at similar scale to Amazon and Walmart and going to help them in that competition? Or will it raise concerns that they have now one concentrated service provider because those grocers are obviously powerful with the kind of local regulatory bodies?

And then my next question for Ravi is just I was curious as to why you're using your shares. Historically, you've been very disciplined with repurchasing shares and it's trading at a level where you have been active repurchasing. So just trying to get a better understanding to why you see it as an opportunity to use your currency at these prices and not just more cash.

Michael, I'll take the first one. We expect a very positive response from grocers. And a lot of what we talk about with grocers is just how are -- how can we together help them compete against the largest companies in the world, online or offline? And how do we actually help them build the capabilities of great technology, a modern tech stack as well as fast delivery? You really need all of these component parts to have a fighting chance. I mean if you -- I mean, if you've seen what has happened in the grocery industry, in particular, I mean, the largest companies are only getting larger and eating more of the pie. And the question is how do you give everybody else a fair fighting shot?

And I think the grocers view things very similarly. I mean these are conversations about what's happening in the industry in terms of the biggest companies eating more of the pie. I mean, that conversation has been happening for the past decade. And it's only kind of gone in that direction of travel. So the question is how do we give everybody else the capabilities to have a level playing field? And that's what we see in this potential partnership, which is we're going to give you the tools, we're going to give you the business with added density, which will help with faster delivery times, more affordable prices for everyone. Greater earning opportunities for shoppers.

And we think it really puts together the best possible chance where you have a modern tech stack that we're only going to continue investing and innovating more and new fulfillment models, which we are inventing as we speak. And certainly, reinvestment, which has been the philosophy all along the way at DoorDash and how we've built our own marketplace.

Mike, look, I mean, on the second point, look, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. We value our stock very highly. Look, we are focused on dilution. It was important for Instacart to have some stock in the deal, as overall, they wanted to participate in the upside in the business. Look, we believe there's upside in the business. We are happy with the consideration between cash and stock.

What I will tell you is, look, our philosophy on buyback has not changed, right, to the second part of your question. We've been conservative. We're going to be opportunistic. We're happy with the buybacks that we've done so far, which has generated a strong IRR. And in the future, if we see there's a good opportunity to buy back, we are happy to do that as long as it's a good return on the overall investment.

Our next question comes from the line of Josh Beck from Raymond James.

I wanted to ask just a little bit about the ambitions on DashMart. I think in the shareholder letter, you mentioned thousands of items from some of the big, well-known grocers. And if you look at maybe someone like Instacart, they've spoken to selection of millions or tens of millions of items. So is there an ambition to have probably not a similar selection, but maybe some fraction of that available via DashMart? And kind of what -- how should we think about the investment angle behind DashMart? Is this something where we need a much bigger fulfillment footprint and we should be thinking more warehouses, more employees? Just like to hear a little bit about how we should frame that up.

Yes. Josh, I'll take that one. I mean if you look at the next decade of work, I mean, it really is about making sure that we can build the local infrastructure for all things last-mile delivery for everything inside your city. That's what DoorDash is working on, right? So that's about merchant software. That's about building new fulfillment models, so some of the warehousing that you're discussing. And of course, it's always about making sure that we have the highest quality and most affordable logistics network. It's why we're investing deeply into autonomy, both land vehicles and drones.

And you're right, there is going to be an investment. But the way to think about this is a lot of the real estate though, that we're talking about, in many ways, has already been designed for us. There are hundreds of thousands of grocery stores available that carry these millions of items that you're already talking about. The real question is whether or not all of that square footage and all of that shelf space is being utilized in the most productive way. None of these stores, as you probably know, are built for delivery. I mean they were effectively built for browsing.

And in a world where delivery and convenience are a much bigger part of consumer expectations and a growing trend, something has to change in order to offer a cost structure as well as a price point that consumers expect to see so that they will continue growing their relationships with each one of these grocers. And that's really what we believe we can build with Instacart. But this is a sequencing process. This is not something -- when you're talking about all things physical and not just pure digital, you can't just hit a button and then magically, everything changes. You have to understand that it's a marriage of technology, operations and people.

I mean a lot of these fantastic businesses of these grocers have been built over many decades, and their processes have been built over many decades. And the question is how do we allow those stores to shine as the showrooms? And how do we actually build the correct square footage as the warehouse or the back-of-house infrastructure such that we can offer fast delivery at attractive prices to compete against the world's biggest companies? That is the vision of DashMart, but it's a sequencing process.

Step one, day 1 after close, it's how do we actually take the combined network where you have added density and DoorDash understands well how to reinvest that added density and give back value to everybody, every audience, consumers, grocers, shoppers. How do we then take that added scale to then drive down further costs as we think about managing warehouses, which is a fixed cost business? How do we then do that with more types of SKUs and items so that we can bring more of the store? Then how do we bring every single store and ultimately everything inside your city to you in minutes?

Our next question comes from the line of Bernie McTernan from Needham & Company.

Maybe just a follow-up on some of the maybe more eloquently said regulatory questions. Tony, is there anything else to add in terms of what got you comfortable in order to get this deal past regulatory? And then second, any additional plans on the go-to-market? It seems like the plan is to keep the Instacart brand, but just wanted to see from a consumer perspective, what we should expect.

Yes. I mean, the first thing I'll say is that -- the first question I always ask is like, what is something fair? And what is it that we actually want to see in the world? And what I believe is fair and something that we want to see in the world is a world in which every business locally of every size has a fair chance at competing. That is the mission of DoorDash. I mean, that's really why I created DoorDash. And if that were to happen, then GDP grows locally, which is the best possible way of GDP growth, not just for jobs, but also for the safety and health of communities and really the lifestyle of why we pick the different neighborhoods and cities in which we live.

And when I think about it from that perspective, and you just look at what's happening in the grocery industry, for example, over the past decade or even 2 decades, what you see is the largest companies are only eating more and more of the pie. Why is that? It's because they've invested aggressively into capabilities like a modern technology stack, like fast delivery, like new fulfillment models. And that's been very difficult when you're a smaller player to invest in on your own. That's what this combination is really about, where DoorDash and Instacart can give every retailer a fighting chance of competing in the modern-day era. And I believe that if we can do that, that's great for every community.

So when I think about it from that perspective, that's how I get comfortable, a, knowing it's the right thing to do whenever you're doing the right thing, that usually is the right narrative for anyone. The second comment around go-to-market, we won't say too much about this for now. But you're right. I mean, I think Instacart has built a great brand, and it's a very unique brand where their audience is very, very loyal to that brand. And so we certainly will support it. We certainly will bring value to consumers. For instance, for the same price that you pay for DashPass today, you'll get access to 2 subscription programs, the Instacart membership program as well as the DoorDash membership program.

And we have some other ideas, too. But a lot of the value in this partnership is really going to come in all things, what I see almost like not visible to the consumer. They'll see the benefits in the form of faster delivery, lower prices, greater selection, higher quality and accuracy of orders. Grocers will see the value in terms of extra sales. Shoppers will see the value in terms of greater earning opportunities. And communities will see the value in greater GDP.

Moving forward, our next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali from Truist.

I just have one question. Ravi, can you maybe just talk a little bit about where you guys are within -- with regards to your replatforming? How much of it has been completed so far? Are you on track? Are you ahead on budget? And then I guess, as part of that question, as Instacart comes into the fold, I guess, starting in 2028, is it fair to assume that effectively, the replatforming becomes like work in progress that extends way beyond next year as well as you try to integrate Instacart and hopefully generate the type of synergies you're talking about?

Youssef, let me take that one. Look, I mean, I think on the overall tech platform, it is on track, both from a cost as well as a time line perspective compared to what I talked about like a few quarters ago. In fact, we have been working on it in a very modular fashion. We have several modules that are already live on the new tech stack. We're already starting to see traffic flow through it. We're fully seeing customer benefits, too. In places where we've already deployed our new tech stack, merchants are getting onboarded faster. Customer support is starting to get better. We already started to see early signs of benefit.

In terms of the overall time line, look, I expect that to be done by the first half of 2027, which is what we had originally expected. So overall, we feel very good about both time line as well as cost.

And your second point around integration of Instacart onto the overall new tech stack, look, I mean, one of the core features as we thought about the new tech stack was the ability to add more future acquisitions and future platforms onto the tech stack. We've done some work around this. We think there's some investment needed. But overall, we don't think it's a massive investment to be able to operate both tech stacks on the replatformed tech stack on a go-forward basis.

Yes, Youssef, the one thing I'll add is something I said, I think, on an earlier question, which is, one of the biggest parts and why this current work on building a single tech stack is so expensive is we're actually literally building new infrastructure, which is why you have a lot of different copies of compute instances and you're overprovisioning things and you're doing all of these things so that you literally have a much faster capability to build any new thing in the future. That includes, obviously, building organically, but also what Ravi said, integrating new products or new technologies or new services. And so it makes us ready for any modern work we want to do with AI agents. It makes us ready for any new acquisitions.

Our next question comes from the line of Dominic Ball from Rothschild & Co Redburn.

Congrats on the news. I just want to go back to another question around consumer AI agents. So acquiring Instacart strengthens your position in the physical world. Advertising is a meaningful contributor to DoorDash's EBITDA. How do you see that business evolving as consumers over time shop through AI agents? And could there be a revenue-sharing agreement with these consumer agents going forward?

Dominic, I don't know if you were able to catch the top of the call. We discussed some of this, which is, right now, AI agents are generating several hundred orders across the time that they've been up and running. So it's been a fairly low use case. And I believe that there will be opportunities in which we can generate win-win opportunities with third-party agents. My general philosophy when it comes to technology is you never want to fight gravity. And if -- and that includes how consumers want to use technology. If consumers want to use technology to shop in certain ways, we're going to find a way to make that a win-win partnership.

And I do believe there are a lot of incremental possible use cases, whether it be helping with long consideration purchases, whether it be doing work on your behalf proactively in the background. But when it comes to a task that's as simple as ordering food, we tend to see that come directly to DoorDash. Not to mention, we're building our own AI agents to make the shopping process a lot easier.

But you also have to remember one thing, which is it's not just about ordering food. That's actually not the hard part of the entire process or ordering groceries. The hard part is making sure that they actually show up and show up in the order in the way that you expected and the condition that you want. That end-to-end journey and making sure all of that is going to happen appropriately, especially when things go awry, we found that to be true living in our product.

That said, I actually think that there will be advertising opportunities even within some of these AI agents. But I think first and foremost, we have to find ways to bring value to consumers. Right now, with the low volumes that I kind of -- I'm telling you about, there isn't yet that value. But as hopefully, that grows, we'll find a way to make that work.

Our last question comes from the line of Justin Post from Bank of America.

Can you give us any idea of the scale of their grocery business relative to yours? And then acquisitions in the grocery space have been somewhat difficult in the past. As you think about talking to the regulators, what are some of the points you would think about as far as share and how this really benefits grocers?

Justin, let me take this one. Look, I mean, I think on your first question on share of grocery, look, we -- it's public information. We're not going to talk about -- disclose anything about Instacart.

To your second point around the value to grocers, look, I mean, ultimately, we talked about some of this, right? Like the goal is how do you take the combination of both capabilities that both companies have and how do you build a better platform, right? We have a highly sophisticated logistics engine. We have a demand generation engine. We've build DashMart Fulfillment Services for some merchants that we talked about. Instacart has done a really good job of being able to build a very large enterprise storefront platform in addition to their own demand generation engine. And I think the combination of both of this will actually help increase the number of products that we can co-sell to both sets for merchants.

In addition to that, I think there's an opportunity where we can actually invest back in the product to build a better product, not just for grocers, right, for consumers as well. We actually think the combination of both is a win-win for consumers, grocers as well as overall shoppers in the ecosystem.

That concludes our question-and-answer session. This concludes today's call as well. Thank you all for attending, and you may now disconnect.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the DoorDash Q2 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the call over to Weston Twigg. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Connor. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our Q2 2026 earnings call. I'm pleased to be joined today by Co-Founder, Chair and CEO Tony Xu; and CFO, Ravi Inukonda. We'll be making forward-looking statements during today's call, including without limitation, our expectations for our business, financial position, operating performance, profitability, our guidance, strategies, capital allocation rosin broader economic environment. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described.

Many of these uncertainties are described in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q. You should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of fewer events or performance. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures may be found in our earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.doordash.com. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results and are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Finally, this call is being audio webcasted on our Investor Relations website. An audio replay of the call will be available on our website shortly after the call.

Operator, I'll pass it back to you, and we can take our first question.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Michael Morton of MoffettNathanson.

I wanted to ask about the grocery business as you've talked about improving the unit economics. From our understanding, there are some grocers on the platforms or -- your platform specifically, who are paying effectively 0 or very low take rates, they came on, looking to see as you could drive demand and how well they could work with DoorDash. I was wondering if that's the case and then what the opportunity is to reprice these relationships going forward, maybe pushing some of the affordability burden that's lending on DoorDash right now back to the grocers .

Yes. Michael, it's Tony. I can start and feel free to chime in, Ravi. What I would say is like we see extremely strong performance in our grocery business. It's the fast-growing part of our marketplace business. and we have very healthy relationships with all of the partners on the platform. I mean in terms of the economic relationships, I'm not going to really comment about anyone in particular. I mean what I will say is that when you are the fastest grower in the market for them, and you are their source of growth. Put a different way, we might be 100% of the growth that they see in terms of their actual business.

You certainly have opportunities to grow your business with them as well as improve your relationships with them. I mean I think if you look at our business as a whole, I think one of the things you see from this quarter, and frankly, I think many of the time periods leading up to now, is that there are many sources of improving economics. We've improving unit economics across all of our categories, we're improving unit economics in our restaurant business, too. We have improving unit economics in our different geographies in which we operate. We have increasing adoption of our Dash pass program as well as accelerating growth in our ads business.

And I think when you add all of that in, we have a business in which there are many levers in which we can control the kind of financial profile in order to make great investments. I mean ultimately, we're here always seeking the next best investment. It doesn't mean that we always make those investments. But when we see the opportunity, we're always leaning in that includes all of the work that we're doing in grocery, which we think there's a long runway as well as all the other opportunities in front of us.

And Mike, just to add, right, like look, I mean, if you take a step back and think about our overall grocery business as well as verticals. We talked about the fact that we became order volume share leaders in Q4. We've continued to extend that lead. Two, when you look at the underlying growth in MAUs, which is the number of users that use categories outside of restaurants, that number is growing or the frequency is growing. We talked about the fact in the letter that basket sizes are growing.

If you look at our historic cohorts, consumers are using us for more use cases, which is driving overall basket sizes higher. Last call, I think I mentioned the fact that we expect our overall new vertical business to be gross profit positive. We're on track for that in the second half of the year. Look, I mean if we think about the business as a whole, we think about retention, order frequency as well as underlying improvement in unit economics and they're all headed in the right direction for us.

The next question is from Mark Mahaney from Evercore ISI.

I'll ask a question about Deliveroo. You've had now 3 quarters in a row of kind of accelerating growth, I think, in orders, yes, and in GOV and then I think in revenue. So just peel that back a little bit the -- how many different opportunities you've had, what you've been able to pull, what you've been able to change in order to deliver that better performance? And it's a little hard to tell, but is it also showing up on the bottom line? Are you able to -- have you been finding ways to improve the profitability of Deliveroo as well.

It's Tony. I can start. What I would say on Deliveroo it really is a story that probably started way back in 2021, when we first made our first large acquisition overseas, which was -- and we've learned a ton, obviously about building our own U.S. business, and we've learned a lot in terms of how Volt has operated in different geographies across Europe as well as how to integrate the lessons that we've learned as well as the lessons that maybe don't apply into each one of these local geographies.

So what you're seeing in Deliveroo -- I agree with you, Mark, is just accelerating performance, frankly, across the board. And that's super exciting because I think, a, it's a validation that our integration work is really working and that the lessons that we've learned in building these marketplace businesses around the world do translate into some of these very meaningful geographies and foundational places where we're just seeing growth in all of our big international markets.

And this doesn't even include the majority of benefits that we expect to see once we actually finish all of our work on building a single tech stack. So as that work kind of comes more fully online, toward the beginning of next year, we expect to see even more benefits as time goes on.

And Mark, just to put a final point right, like when you look at the actual performance of Deliveroo itself, to your point, volume growth or MAU growth or subscription growth, actually, when you look at it on a year-over-year basis, it's been the highest that we've seen in the last couple of years. At the same point, to your second part of your question, we've increased the unit economics as well. But the way in which we're operating the business is very similar, right?

We're finding great opportunities to drive investment back in selection, quality subscription is a big area of focus for us. So we're going to continue to invest back in the business. And my expectation is we'll continue to drive higher top line as well as meet the profitability targets that we set out in the last letter.

The next question is from Nikhil Devnani from Bernstein.

I'll stick with the theme of international. And I guess broadly, there's, I guess, a common perception that international might be lower quality growth because maybe you're not #1 everywhere or maybe the competitive set now is better funded and more consolidated today, I would love your perspective on that overall sentiment and really how you structurally see the longer-term earnings power or quality of growth out of these international markets relative to the domestic business. And how important is it to have a pure market share number versus more minimum viable scale in these jurisdictions that allow you to then operate well?

Yes. Nikhil, it's Tony. I can start. I think there are a couple of different questions that you're asking. The first is really what do we see happening internationally. Our aspiration is to be the global leader in local commerce. And we think we are best positioned to do that given that we bring the deepest and the broadest portfolio of products in order to serve those audiences. So like you said, it's a game that is played locally. There are no global network effects in these kinds of businesses.

And one of the points you raised is the right one where sometimes there isn't an obvious tie between the market position and kind of your economic profile. And that's because it is a minimum viable scale business. That said, though, when I actually look at our current execution, the vast majority of our international business is concentrated in our top 10 markets outside of the U.S. And in those markets, we are the leader or we are a very strong number and we're gaining share in all of the markets.

Some of these markets include places like the U.K., Italy, Germany, the Nordics, Israel, Canada, I mean, I can keep going, but we like kind of what we see. And it kind of really is a follow-on to the previous question, where Ravi was talking about how we're making improvements fundamentally to the actual core propositions to all the audiences. We're making -- we're offering wider selection, better prices, their quality of delivery in terms of reliability, accuracy and speed, and we're improving our customer service.

And so whenever I see that, and I also see the opportunity for the runway to bring our portfolio of B2B products, which have done really well in the U.S. but even have more opportunity outside of the U.S., just given the more nascent development of digital technologies in the restaurant and retail categories overseas, I mean, I just think the potential is very, very big.

And is -- I mean, the results are pretty clear, right? We've talked about the fact that on the rude, I mean the growth is accelerating. In fact, when you look at the underlying cohorts, the growth is some of the highest that we've seen over the last couple of years. Even outside of that, when I look at the portfolio excluding group, we are growing. MAUs are growing, the order frequency is growing. World plus, in fact, our subscription program in bold are one of the best quarters, which is a record quarter in terms of overall paid subscriber growth. At the same point, it's not just purely about growth for us, right?

Like we are improving the unit economics, not just across route but across the world as well. When you look at whether it's gross profit or contribution, both of them have continued to improve on a year-over-year basis. operator, can we can take the next question?

The next question is from Deepak Mathivanan from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Great. Thank you. Tony, last month, Andy talked with Boris a lot about how DASH is aiming to translate AI spend into outcomes, somewhat closer to the business metrics now while also letting employees to experiment aggressively with AI tools. Can you talk about where you're seeing this attribution clearly now? And how we should broadly think about AI spend at Dash over the next 12 to 18 months? And then maybe one for you, Ravi. U.S. restaurant GOV acceleration. Can you expand on the drivers of the growth? I know weather was disruptive last quarter, but you also had factors like World Cup. Curious if you can talk a little bit more about the factors of acceleration in Q2.

Yes, sure. On the AI question, Deepak, I would say a couple of things. The first thing is we want to make sure that our -- any technology that we need whether it's AI or frankly, anything else that it's actually rooted in delivering a better customer experience. Because if it's not, I'm not exactly sure what problem we're actually trying to solve and I don't think it makes sense to just play with the technology for the technology's sake.

And so when you look at some of the things that we've seen success, for example, one of the more recent products we launched was called DoorDash Ask, which is an ordering agent that helps customers discover restaurants that are similar to ones that they've ordered in the past but that are new to them that helps them build a grocery card in under 2 minutes. So really solving actual pain points that we see in using an increasingly larger and more diversified marketplace. That's one example.

On the merchant side, we've seen automation in building catalogs for retailers or menus for restaurants, which includes all of the photos, the metadata around all of the different SKUs and items so that we can actually onboard a merchant faster in order to get same-store sales growth. For Dashers, we're seeing improvements in routing as well as how we can help Dashers find the best areas to Dash. Those are some examples of how we actually have applied AI in a way that is actually meaningful in terms of driving customer outcomes, which ultimately deliver business results.

The other thing that we've done is kind of with all things at DoorDash, we care as much about how we do it in order to be efficient as we do about allowing some degree of inefficiency towards invention. And we've built a lot of tools at tools like Dash bench and other systems internally that allow us to model the appropriate tools and give those tools to be used for the right level of token spend or intelligence required. And so I think those are some of the things in which we found ourselves. That's kind of our approach in terms of how we've applied towards AI or frankly, any technology. It's why we're excited to keep going and lean in, in a way that I think is disciplined on the one hand, but on the other hand, allows us to bring real customer benefits.

Deepak, on your second question around restaurant growth, yes, I mean, restaurant growth was quite strong in the quarter, if you look at it. In fact, growth accelerated from Q1 to Q2. A lot of the growth is coming from just increase in DashPass subscribers. So a couple of points, right? We wrote in the letter as well. We added more number of DashPass subscribers in the last year compared to the 2 prior years.

Number two, when I look at the paid subscriber growth in DashPass, it was one of the highest that we've seen in the last couple of years. A lot of that is the underlying product continuing to get better, lot of that has increased investment that we made in selection as well as quality. In fact, if you look at mature cohorts, they are continuing to engage higher than what we've seen before. New consumers continue to be quite strong as well. Ultimately, all of this is driving the growth that you're seeing in restaurants.

And what I would also say is if you think about Q2 of last year, it was unusually strong for us. So comping against what was a strong Q2 of last year and still putting up the strong numbers in Q2. That's a true testament to the either demand that we're seeing in the business as well as the underlying improvements in product.

The next question is from Dominic Ball of Rothschild & Co Redburn.

Thank you for the question. Interesting commentary about kind of investing more in merchant services and software. I think it's somewhat well known to actually being tested in its POS product in a few markets in the U.S. with both SMBs and restaurants. So would just love to know about how these test trials are going, what products and features are kind of resonating? What is kind of driving some restaurants may be choosing to use the last year? And then how do we think about a potential more for commercial launch going forward?

Our vision is to be the best partner to every local business that probably is pretty clear from the missions and stay on. And the way we do this is that we want to give every business the same tools that we built for ourselves so that they can grow their digital business. So if you think about what that looks like, I mean we kind of play in this ecosystem where we have at least 3 offerings today, right? We have our marketplace. We have tools to help build the digital businesses of restaurants and retailers.

In fact, that business serves over 150,000 businesses and has grown 40% year-over-year in the quarter. And then more recently, we've introduced products that actually drive customers inside the store. Some of these products include going out as well as reservations. And then on the business side, it includes SevenRooms, which is a company that we acquired about a year ago. And -- when I think about what this ecosystem allows us to do, I mean, it allows us to help customers build our relationships with the local businesses. and ideally forge regulars for each one of these local businesses.

And the reason why we can do this is because we have the biggest scale as well as the deepest customer data set to allow us to actually drive this engagement. For example, a customer may start by ordering delivery from the DoorDash app. And then perhaps they sign up for a loyalty program on a merchant's first-party channel, something that we've built for them. And when it makes sense, both DoorDash and the merchants can incentivize the customer to go inside the store or go inside the restaurant and actually have a meal.

And so when you think about the interaction effects here, what we really are able to do is be the best growth partner for all these businesses. And for consumers, give them the most choice in terms of how they actually want to interact with all these businesses. I think the proof points we kind of highlighted in our quarterly update are really, really strong, and we think that this ecosystem is one that has a very long runway.

The next question is from Jason Helfstein of Oppenheimer.

Just 2 questions. One, can you talk -- you talked a little bit about dot deliveries in the release. I guess anything you want to share on how you're thinking about unit economics kind of like today versus where we think it goes long term and how you think that impacts demand around elasticity? And then is it possible to share the AOV for the most recent period in the chart on Page 3, where you're comparing the restaurant versus the grocery and retail?

Sure. Maybe I can start with the question on Dot and then Ravi, feel free to chime in on the second question. I would say a few things about DoorDash Dot. The overall vision for autonomous delivery, at least at DoorDash is that we want to offer AVs throughout the network so that we can deliver the best service to customers. The best service could be the fastest delivery, the most affordable delivery, delivery from the widest selection, including from very far away places.

And I would say that the real secret sauce or the magic that we've learned in building DoorDash Dot is that it's really the complexity of marrying the operations with the technology that actually allows you to even have a chance at delivering scale autonomous delivery. Put a different way, DoorDash Dot or any AV for that matter, alone will not make autonomous deliveries actually scale, certainly not at any level of meaningful penetration for customers.

I mean -- at the end of the day, you have to solve very challenging operational problems in the [indiscernible] for customers. I mean at the end of the day, you have to solve very challenging operational problems in the physical world. You have to solve the loading problem at the merchant, you have to estimate merchant prep times in the case of restaurants or inventory levels in the case of retailers and grocery stores. You got to suffer difficult drop-off issues like perhaps a doorman inside of a high-rise building or a complicated gate entry in an apartment unit. These are all of the issues that we've encountered and are candidly like maybe 11,000 of the issues that we've encountered in building DoorDash Dot in our test market.

And so I think to get to the milestone that we have today with Dot where we have meaningful scale in our test market has been a huge accomplishment by the team, and it gives us confidence that you can actually truly scale autonomous delivery if you both can master the operation and the technology. And that's why I think we're the best positioned to do it because we run the network, and we're also building the technology ourselves, which gives us the lowest level of detailed understanding of how to actually make this happen.

And it doesn't mean that we have to build everything. I mean we actually whether it's by land or by air, we have a variety of partners that we interact with. And for everyone, we kind of solve all of the challenging operational problems for them and we do that through our autonomous delivery platform. So for a merchant, you can take your existing DoorDash integration and you get access to any and all AVs and for customers, you're going to actually one day get the benefit of these technologies.

And -- with respect to the cost profile, we're very excited by what we see. I mean, it's exponential progress. But I think that the first milestone for us has really been can you actually commercialize this in a way that you've seen certain robotaxi providers like Waymo actually do it with rideshare, we've been able to now do it with delivery.

Jason, it's Ravi. The second point, right, like let me start with what we're seeing in the business. Look, as we continue to operate and expand our new verticals and grocery business, what you're seeing is as the product is getting better, the basket sizes are increasing. This is what we had originally expected, which is as we add more selection and the quality of the product continues to get better, you would have customers use us for more use cases, which will ultimately have the basket cases to be higher. We're seeing that in older cohorts, we're seeing that in newer cohorts, which is visible overall in the business as well.

But let me actually take a step back and walk you through what our thesis was and why we put the second chart in the letter. Look, our core thesis was twofold. One is we knew that as customers or consumers habituate on the platform, they will spend more with us. They'll spend more with us on the restaurant business. They'll adopt newer categories. They'll spend more with us on the new verticals business. The example that we took in that chart was one of our older cohorts, which is largely representative actually of the other cohorts that we see in the business where consumers spend on restaurants is increasing, consumer spend on new verticals is increasing. And at the same time, DashPass penetration is increasing.

And if you think about it, right, this is almost like a self-reinforcing loop where the product gets better, consumers adopt and habituated to DashPass as they adopt DashPass, they continue to use the product more, which ultimately leads to more growth as well as more profit dollars in the system. This has largely been the focus for us, and that's largely what you're seeing in the underlying cohorts. And we're very pleased with the performance of that in the underlying business.

The next question is from Shweta Khajuria of Wolfe Research.

Let me try 2, please. First is on the DashMart fulfillment services since your launch and since working with a handful of partners, I understand, what have you learned so far that you could potentially quantify or some sort of tangible learnings that you could share, whether it is on the magnitude of customer experience improvement or something else? And then what metrics do you look at to be able to make that decision to scale DashMart Mark fulfillment services?

And then the second question is just overall EBITDA growth. where now we are in the back half of this year and in the light of investments this year, but more importantly, as we think about balancing growth and top line growth and EBITDA growth. Ravi, how are you thinking about that as we think about the demand trends that you see right now and balancing growth with profitability?

Yes. I can start by answering about DashMart fulfillment services. To say the obvious, we want every local business to be successful in their local communities. And that's true in every category from restaurants to grocery to retail. And one of the things that we learned 5 years ago when we launched our grocery business, even though it's going so well and we're helping lots of grocers compete is that there's this structural challenge with grocery delivery, where grocers don't know their inventory.

In some ways, it's almost impossible for a whole host of reasons, one of which is because consumers come in and they move things around. And so it's a very difficult proposition then to offer customers a use case where you're asking them to pay a premium for delivery, but they don't get exactly what they order. So our solution to this is DashMart Fulfillment Services, where we are managing warehouses, where we control the inventory and sell exactly what is in stock so that we can actually offer near perfect accuracy and give customers the selection that they want from any place inside the city and also very, very quickly.

And so in terms of what we've seen so far since our announcement last fall and the launch that we've had with several partners is we're seeing lots of incremental demand because these warehouses are running near 24/7. If you compare that to traditional store operating hours, that's a dramatic increase in TAM as well as -- really just solving the needs of customers because customers sometimes don't get freed up until maybe after store closing hours before they can think about the next day or planning their groceries or their shopping needs.

So we're seeing lots of incremental demand. And we're also seeing 10x better error rates because we're running the inventory. And as a result, we're selling customers exactly -- the customers are getting exactly what they ordered, and we're selling them exactly what's actually in stock. And so, all the signs right now are really positive for us to scale DashMart services. But look, this is complicated. I mean this is building physical infrastructure, we're obviously adding technology to led by managing the inventory and obviously running the entire fulfillment. So -- but you can imagine a world in which these warehouses can power all of the needs inside of the city.

And you can -- what you can really do when you do something like that is you can really unlock the amount of selection available to customers because today, I would say DoorDash is delivering probably 1/10 in most cities, the available selection in terms of retail and grocery and the like. And so we can actually build this capability and do it in concert with all of the great retail and grocery selection inside of the city, I think customers get the best product. They get all the selections that they want at perfect quality very quickly.

And sure that your second question around -- look, we try to balance both growth as well as profitability, right? You had asked about the demand trends. When I look at the underlying business, the dimensions continue to be quite strong. I mean, as you know, we focus and spend a lot of our time on cohorts. MAUs when I look across the board, they are at all-time high subscription, I talked about the fact that both domestically and internationally, was one of our best quarters in a sense that the subscription continues to be at record highs.

Restaurant growth accelerated to the group continues to do quite well. Overall, when I look at the underlying improvements in the product that's driving the improvements that you're seeing both from retention as well as order frequency. At the same point -- I mean, look, I mean, the quarter was very strong from an underlying profitability perspective as well. A lot of that is because the underlying unit economics continue to improve.

For us, the philosophy has always been the same, right? We're consistently trying to improve efficiency. There's many sources across the board, whether it is sales and marketing, fixed costs and down the P&L. And our goal is to consistently reinvest back in the business. Look, we talked about the fact that we're investing back into the business and building products, some of which we've talked about earlier on the call, whether it's autonomy, unification of the global tech stack or investing back in merchant services, all of those are going well. They're all going on budget and on plan according to what I had estimated a couple of quarters ago.

These will increase the surface area. Ultimately, the goal for us is to continue to drive both growth as well as profit dollars as long as we make the product better, what we're seeing in the business is we're able to do both, right? This is how we think about balancing both growth as well as profit dollar production in our business.

Next question is from Josh Beck of Raymond James.

I had maybe a product-oriented question. So on dock getting to high single digit within a market by the end of the year, could you give us maybe like some characteristics? Is this because it's maybe more of a longer route, suburb type of market? And if you were to maybe add in all of the different modalities between maybe sidewalk, pathway, drones, vehicles, is there some type of ceiling that you have in your mind in terms of maybe the percentage of orders that could be filled through autonomous?

And then just second, barely on the AI system, obviously, lots of attractive characteristics, discovery, basket, et cetera. Curious if there's been other observations with respect to better frequency of these customers? Curious on maybe what you have to say about ad monetization, it seems like maybe time spent could be less, but conversion could be better. So just curious on those two topics.

All right. I think you had like maybe 7 or 8 questions in there, Josh, but I'll do my best. Look, on DoorDash Dot, it is a representative DoorDash market. We're testing in Phoenix. And so -- and we're testing it with real scale now, which is like it's a real accomplishment when you think about -- these are not demos, these are not prototypes, there are no fixed routes. This is real life, and this is real life for tens of thousands of customers that are receiving real deliveries.

And -- and so that's very exciting. It's also very challenging. I mentioned maybe 5 or 6 issues that might be literally [indiscernible] the number of issues that you have to solve to actually have a chance of making autonomous deliveries actually happen. And that's true whether you're doing it by land, and it's also true whether you're doing it by air. I mean, I know we've seen this with DoorDash Air as well in addition to all the partners that we test with and bring our scale to.

And so, what I would say is the -- what's going to determine the sealing or the penetration of autonomous delivery is whether or not you can master both the operations and the technology. And I believe we're best positioned to do that because we're actually doing both in-house. And so we are getting to the lowest level of detail, chopping down the very heavy wood of every issue that exists in the real world, that exists in every single restaurant, retailer on the road. I mean Dot travels, road, sidewalk and biking. It's the only vehicle in the world to do that autonomously.

And there's a lot of challenges when you actually try to take on them multimodality. And -- and one of the interesting things, perhaps the most interesting thing of what we're building with antonomy is this autonomous delivery platform. You can think of this as the brain that actually makes it all happen. That deciphers which vehicles go to which orders that decides whether you have a mixed route, where you have human Dashers as part of the legs of the journey and autonomous vehicles and other parts of the journey. That looks into the configuration of the package size and the package design and the package weight.

And there's a lot of complexity, but all of that gets reduced and kind of goes and disappears because we kind of handle it through our autonomous delivery platform so that merchants get the same integration that they have with DoorDash today. They don't have to change a single thing about their workflow and customers just get access to the benefits of autonomous delivery, which will be in the future, speed, cost and more selection.

And so I think that's going to be really, really, really exciting. And again, like it's really going to be the execution that determines the ceiling. And I think we're best suited for that execution. I think your second question on the AI assistant. I mean the short answer is, of course, if you're -- whenever you're making -- whenever you're reducing friction in a product, you get more usage. So if we're making it easier to build a grocery card, you get more grocery cards and you get bigger grocery cards. And it doesn't change at all the ads profile or anything else.

If anything, you actually get just more incremental orders and more incremental opportunities because people order more often. The same thing is true about restaurants. If you now discover that there's something slightly healthier or faster or cheaper or just better or different from what you typically order then you tend to order more often and possibly for more use cases. We eat 20 to 25 times a week and DoorDash only touches a fraction of that.

And that is really the runway we have. When I think about the number of meal occasions and shopping needs on top of that, it's north of 100 per month. And so we have a lot of shots on goal that we can go capture. And if we just reduce the friction of actually ordering and then master and continue to master the operations of fulfillment, all of the metrics are going in the right direction.

The next question is from Youssef Squali of Truist Securities.

So guys, I just want to double-click on the margin question again. Can you -- Ravi, can you maybe just talk about the drivers for the material beat and adjusted EBITDA in Q2. It came quite a bit outside of the guidance range. More recently, you guys have been guiding to, at some point, hit somewhere in the midpoint. This one is dramatically higher. Were there any investments that got pushed back into Q3 and then Q4? And then are we still tracking to show higher year-on-year adjusted EBITDA margin for 2026 ex-Deliveroo?

Yes, let me take that, right? Like look, at the highest level, what I would say is the core restaurant business continues to come on all cylinders. Growth, like I said on Deepak's question, right, like growth accelerated, unit economics continue to improve, new verticals growing much faster than our restaurant business as well as we saw on track to being gross profit positive by the end of the year. International reduces do well. We've talked about some of the strength that you're seeing in Deliveroo as well as the bed unit economics there.

More specifically, what we saw in the quarter was the unit economic improvement came in ahead of our expectations, specifically in a couple of areas, as was one of them, some total was the other one. where in the second half of the quarter, those unit economics came in slightly ahead of what we had expected. In addition, we beat our own internal volume expectations, the rules contribution profit positive that led to some of the upside that you're seeing in the business.

Well, look, I mean, more broadly, what I would say is our philosophy in how we operate the business, that is not changing. Look, it's a very tightly managed business with a lot of levers that we control up and down the P&L. What we're consistently trying to do is try to find sources of efficiency. Like I said earlier, there's many sources of efficiency that we work on and take those and reinvest that back in the business.

We're not trying to optimize the last dollar from 1 quarter to the next. Look, our focus has always been on how do you build a large durable business over time while continuing to increase the overall profit dollar production. To your second point, look, I mean, book has always been on landing inside the range. And if you think about the second half from a modeling perspective, I would expect us to land inside the range of the guidance that we've given in Q3. There are going to be times like in Q2 where the EBITDA beat comes in later in the quarter. In those times, we just don't have enough time to reinvest back in the business, especially at the levels of efficiency that we desire. Q2 was one of those quarters where we're happy to drop it to the bottom line.

The next question is from Ross Sandler of Barclays.

Just a quick follow-up on the AV and then I had a question about the charts in the letter. So Tony, I think you have a few hundred robots in Phoenix. How quickly is the plan to kind of bring this to other cities? That's the first question. And then on those charts, we love the DoorDash charts. But I'm guessing if Uber were to put together their sub-penetration relative to gross profit, it would probably look kind of the same for their leading markets.

So are there examples of like cities or countries that you are kind of demonstrating the same trend as the U.S., but you've either come from behind or you've kind of come like head-to-head and overtaken one of your competitors on DashPass or volt penetration for subscribers?

Sure. I can start on the AV question. Yes. I mean we're very excited about what's happening in Phoenix. But like as I mentioned, I mean, there's a lot. We got to go figure out. And I'm a big believer that you really have to nail something before you scale it, especially in the area of autonomy, where you're really solving like the problems of like 6 separate individual companies almost and you kind of have to be great at all of -- and it's just tightly orchestration again, between the operations and the technology. I can't stress that enough because that is the name of the game.

I think just doing one or the other is not going to get it done. And so there's a lot of work to be done. We are in parallel, of course, securing permits because we work with cities to actually unlock a lot of this. And we do have plans to expand. We'll share certainly more as time comes, but we thought that it would be helpful to offer just one milestone that we've accomplished and are excited about. But look, the road ahead for AV is is very exciting, but it's going to take time.

And it's -- and mostly, it's going to take great execution between the operations and the technology. And that's what we're most excited about.

On your second point, right, let me take us back and talk about subscription more broadly. I mean if you think about subscription, it's been a key area of focus for us for the past couple of years. Subscription continues to do well. whether it's subscribers in the U.S. or international, the growth rate are some of the highest that we've seen in the last couple of years. And the whole thesis for us was, as DashPass penetration continues to increase, overall gross profit per MAU continues to increase. and I look at the penetration levels, we're still very, very early.

We're seeing similar behavior in the international markets compared to what we see in the U.S., albeit some of the international countries are slightly behind because we launched subscription slightly later than what we did in the U.S. And for specific examples, right, I mean, you talked about some of the examples on Deliveroo. Look, if you're thinking about the U.K. market, we are gaining share. We're one of the fastest growing in that market. We are accelerating growth. We are accelerating paid subscriber growth, volume growth compared what we've seen in the last couple of years.

Even outside of Deliveroo, when you look at some of the countries that we operate in both, in majority of the countries that we operate, we are continuing to gain share. And the key thing for us is we're not just looking at share going gains. We're looking at what the order rate improvements are. When you look at either the 3 months or the 6 months, we have continued to improve order rates. At the same point, across both Deliveroo as well as [indiscernible] it's been a way for us to drive efficient growth, where we look at the unit economics, either on a year-over-year basis or over the last couple of years, we've done a pretty good job of improving that.

Net-net, I mean, look, we've talked about some of the countries before, right, whether it's U.K., Israel or some of the other markets. We continue to do really well in terms of overall share gain as well as the underlying improvements in cohort metrics.

The next question is from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley.

I want to ask one about the global tech stack and sort of the unification of global tech stack. So now that you've got the tech stack sort of built as of the spring. I know you've been testing a lot of modules and new capabilities. Can you give us some examples where you're seeing early signal with actual quantifiable benefits of the new modules that give you confidence you're going to get real return on ROIC on these investments as we go into 2027?

Sure. Brian, yes, I mean, I would say we're still building. The way you build these single tax taxes, it's not like I mean the better analogy is like it's not like a LEGO project where there's like a finishing step in the instruction manual. It's more like you're constantly -- well, first, you have to like replace an engine where you're flying a plane that's growing in speed and climbing in an attitude and then you're constantly making tweaks. That's probably the more appropriate analogy, but we're doing it.

And where are we seeing benefits? I mean, a lot of places already. I mean you're seeing conversion wins from improvements in search. You're seeing wins in automation in terms of our customer support flows and by bring things from one place that was more automated to another place that was let automated. I mean the theme really is what we're trying to do and why there's a thesis for a return here is because you're taking the best-of-breed feature and literally offering into all of our 41 markets.

And so this is not like taking one stack and then just like copying and pasting everything into the -- all of the brands, it's actually literally taking the best of each and then putting it into a completely new engine and then running -- I mean it's like building a new company. And so -- and that's why it's really hard. And candidly, it's not something that you would do if you do not believe more in the future than you did in the past. And -- and that doesn't even take into account the velocity benefits after you complete the project where if you were to ship once from an infrastructure perspective that it actually gets shipped everywhere.

The next question comes from the line of Ronald Josey of Citigroup.

I wanted to go back to the gross profit in DashPass chart that we had in the letter here. And so the lines more recently are steepening for both, which is talking all the trends that we saw. So I'd love to hear more, maybe Tony, on just the plan or strategy is to continue adding value to the program and the push and pull what that value does to overall gross profit. And then more recently, I think the company launched newer or greater fees for larger delivery radiuses. Just talk to us about the reasoning for those fees and the benefits.

Ron, let me take a stab at both of those, right? Like look, subscription continues do well. T has always been, as consumers habituate and we graduate them to DashPass, their overall value proposition from not just a gross profit, but order frequency as well as retention goes up. And the example that we put in the chart was largely Jan 2021 cohort. And we wanted to use that because we were officially old enough where you could actually see the trends. Also it's largely representative of what we see in the other cohorts in the rest of the portfolio as well. Where what we see is as consumers order more with us, as they retain more, they graduate to DashPass, and as they graduate to DashPass, they continue to spend more with us.

And we think that not just in the older court but in some of the newer ports as well. which is ultimately leading to some of the growth that you're seeing in DashPass, right? I talked about the fact that in U.S., in DashPass, Q2, the growth rate in terms of paid subscribers was one of the hires that we've seen probably in the last 2 years. We added more number of paid subscribers in the last year compared to the 2 prior years. A lot of that is because the underlying product continues to get better, right?

Now if you're a DashPass, you get to access retail, grocery, other categories, which ultimately drives more value to DashPass subscribers. The way we increase the value proposition of DassPass to your question is making the underlying product better, right? Because it's more selection, making the quality of the product better continue to drive affordability. And when we do that, we see clear improvements in both adoption of DashPass as well as the engagement from a DassPass perspective.

And your second point, look, I mean, if you think about the new fee service that we talked about last couple of weeks ago. Look, it's largely a realignment of consumers what they pay compared to the time and effort that Dashers put in delivery. If you're thinking about it from like an impact to the P&L perspective. I wouldn't think of it that way based on what we've seen in the market so far. The fee is largely similar or slightly less actually for the vast majority of the orders. So I would expect it to be a massive impact, especially in the markets that we've launched it so far.

The next question is from the line of Justin Post of Bank of America .

Just wonder if you can give us any genic traffic update if you're seeing any traffic from there? And then given your huge merchant scale, are there ways where you could really capitalize on that traffic as they roll out booking capabilities and maybe even lower your marketing costs?

Justin, I'll take that one and feel free to add, Ravi. I mean what I say in short is no, the volume is quite low, I think, from some of the agentic partners that we've been testing with -- but it also isn't that surprising, I think, for a couple of reasons. I think first, I think especially for some of the larger platforms out there, their core focus has been on the enterprise and much less, especially on coding agents and probably less on the agentic side.

But the second thing is just structurally speaking, if you look at it from a consumer's perspective, consumers don't really care what you call this thing, whether you call it agenetic flows and pre-genetic flows post agentic flows they honestly just care about getting their burrito or their pair of Nikes or their stock of weekly groceries. That's what they care about. And at the end of the day, what that means is they care about the end-to-end experience, right?

And so if you think about it, we're effectively the only place that can offer that, whether that starts by knowing where all the inventory sits. What's in stock? What's not in stock, obviously, managing the logistics at both the merchants as well as the drop-off, and then, of course, solving exception handling when things were to go awry, if there's the wrong item or the wrong promotion applied to an item. I think these are all the details. You kind of have to get right if you want to do agentic commerce for our category.

And that's just not something that I think a lot of people are doing, but we're kind of filling the void, right? It's why DoorDash launched DoorDash Ask where we effectively are solving that -- but we're still very open, very excited to test all sources of incremental traffic, which is what we believe can happen. Something I said probably 5 years ago, is that in the business world, this is 2021, I was forecasting that there would be two big war that would occur.

One is kind of the battle for retention, and you see that playing out with chat assistants and other types of more powerful assistants now. And then the other is kind of the battle for Adams. And I do think that the 2 services will come and partner with one and other and our focus is squarely on making sure that we master the physical role so we can be the most useful to all these digital systems when they kind of come around to focus on agentic commerce that will be willing partners and grow together.

The next question is from the line of Doug Anmuth of JPMorgan.

Great. I know you don't manage for take rate, but I just wanted to get a little bit more color just on net revenue margin and the pickup that you saw kind of in 2Q? Just trying to understand some of the drivers there in terms of how much might have been Deliveroo, contribution versus advertising and fee changes and how you think about that going forward?

Doug, let me take that one. Look, I mean, you're right. I mean, we're not operating the business towards a take rate or net revenue margin percentage. Our goal has been always to optimize for overall profit dollars. And as you can see, pretty strong quarter from that perspective as well as the Q3 guide. Look, lots of moving parts within the take rate, the Q-on-Q increase, which is what I think you're referring to is largely from Dashers.

Dashers cost are seasonal for us when you go from Q1 to Q2, the actual costs are lower in Q2, that's what gave rise to sort of the tick up in take rate that you saw from Q1 to Q2 and if you're thinking about from a modeling perspective, what I would expect for the rest of the year, I expect take rate to slightly be in the similar range in Q3, so flattish from Q2 to Q3 and lower in Q4. Again, as a reminder, I mentioned this before, Q4 Dasher costs are higher for us. That will impact take rate. So you should expect Q4 take to be slightly lower than the Q3 is.

But net net, look, I mean, the goal for us is not to manage to a specific line in the P&L, especially the take rate percentage. Our gols is to invest selectively up and down the P&L.

The next question is from the line of Tom Champion of Piper Sandler.

Ravi, I'd just be curious about your big picture view on AI spending and the ROI that you're seeing. And I'm curious if it's impacted your future hiring plans at all?

Sure. I mean, I think -- let me start -- I mean not just purely about driving cost efficiency for us, right? Like we said earlier on the call, look, we are encouraging our teams to use AI across the board. For us ultimately, the goal is how do you build better products for customers, which will mainly drive both growth as well as overall profit do. Ask was one of the examples in which we are driving benefit to customers. We've done similar things on both merchant side, we were helping merchants onboard faster.

On the Dasher side, we've been with conversational bodies where dashers, if they are stuck, they can actually chat with the agent to help themselves get on stock. At the same point, look, we are seeing productivity in the cross the board. Internally, we're using it in sales, accounting, marketing, finance as well. The goal for us has always been, it's not just purely about encouraging the usage. How do you actually drive efficiency as well? We've taken a number of steps. We've built models where internally, the tasks are routed to the right model depending on what the actual cost, quality and efficiency is.

We've put caps in place, we've also incorporated some of the AI budgets into teams existing budgets. Look, we are seeing gains from the usage of AI. The sharper question for us is how do you take the efficiency gains and reinvest that back in the business? Look, we are investing in building some large areas, right? We've talked about autonomy. We've talked about AI. We've talked about the unification of the tech stack. These are all areas where we think it's going to be strong low for us. The goal for us is how do you take the efficiency gains, whether it's AI or any other part of the P&L? But the philosophy is same, right? How do you reinvest that back in the business ultimately to build scale and durability over a longer period of time. which leads to higher overall free cash flow production. So it's largely how we're thinking about the efficiency gains, but we are happy with what we're seeing in the business today.

There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the DoorDash Q1 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the call over to Weston Twigg. Weston, please go ahead.

All right. Thank you, Elizabeth. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our Q1 '26 earnings call. I'm pleased to be joined today by Cofounder, Chair and CEO, Tony Xu; and CFO, Ravi Inukonda.

We'll be making forward-looking statements during today's call, including without limitation, -- our expectations for our business, financial position, operating performance, profitability, our guidance, strategies, capital allocation approach and the broader economic environment. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Many of these uncertainties are described in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events or performance. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures may be found in our earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.borvash.com. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results that are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Finally, this call is being audio webcasted on our Investor Relations website. An audio replay of the call will be available on our website shortly after the call ends.

Operator, I'll pass it back to you, and we can take our first question.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

Let me try 2, please. One is on product and the other is on partnership. So first on product, could you please talk about how you envision your product develop over the next 12 to 24 months as you integrate more of genic and AI capability. So will we have an opportunity to sort of communicate via voice and put a car together and execute a transaction even saving us more time or better search and discovery or whatever it may be, if you could please talk to that?

And then the second one is on partnership. You announced extension and expansion of your partnership with Lyft. As you think about the greater value proposition around local commerce and becoming the operating system for local commerce, how do you think about travel as an adjacency with Uber partnering with Expedia? I partnering with Airbnb and booking.com type partnership a value add or something else. Your thoughts on that would be great.

Shweta, that's Tony. Maybe I'll take both of those and feel free to add in anything you want, Robbie. Look, on the first question with respect to product. The DoorDash philosophy and story has always been the same here, which is we have to create the best end-to-end shopping experience. If we do that, we will continue to be the ones that innovate, lead. We'll continue to deliver great results like the ones that you saw in the quarter and in the many years leading up to the results that we've just shared.

And so there's not one way to do that. You talked a bit in your premise, Shweta, this idea that you should be able to, with the assistance of a genic like tools, to have better discovery, search experiences, and we agree with you. I think that we absolutely will have a genetic ordering experiences in which it will be a lot easier for customers to do many things that they do today with much lower friction to discover things that they perhaps didn't know existed on DoorDash to formulate complicated queries and solve those in the best possible way.

And the most important thing in delivering this is making sure that we actually can do it so that we don't just win on discovery and the upper funnel, but the end-to-end experience. Because what's the point of having the best discovery experience we can't bring you that exact item or if that exact item were out of stock or it doesn't meet your personalized preferences that we can actually solve for that need.

And so for us, the way I think about it is there's no one thing. There's no one trick. It's making constant and continuous improvements to the selection quality, the accuracy of the cattle logs, making sure that we offer the widest choice in terms of affordability and different price points. offering certainly the best quality of experience in speed, in timeliness and accuracy and then obviously in customer support, which I think also is having an agentic revolution in of itself. And so, you will see all of these things play out in the DoorDash product experience.

The most important thing though is that we have to build the best end-to-end experience. And we are the only company that has the most robust catalog, much of which is actually about the physical role that does not exist in any digital repository that cannot be scraped and that we, ourselves, uniquely own access to because of all the work that we do to actually build up a repository of the physical world. And so that's something that we will continue to build, I think, greater and greater [indiscernible] and especially in the world of agenticommerce.

Your second question on membership and kind of this idea of how will partnerships evolve. The way to think about it is that membership experiences and the benefits that kind of live underneath the umbrella of membership programs. They kind of only matter if they are best-of-breed experiences to customers, right? This is why you see different customers, for example, choose a variety of different memberships even for the same product, like if you take streaming, for example.

Some people prefer shows of a certain format on 1 network, whereas some others prefer shows of a different format on a different network, and that's why they end up having multiple membership programs and things like this. And what it really stands. And there's so many examples in which I can give you of this, where being best of breed is really ultimately what customers care about and why they will choose to either adopt your program or not adopt your program.

And as you saw in some of the results that we kind of discussed, record engagement in Dash Pass as well as our other membership programs around the world, what we're doing is we're building the best-of-breed product experience when it comes to eating and in shopping increasingly as we go outside of the restaurant category.

Now there's a long ways to go, right? I mean, there are 20 to 25 occasions for eating a loan every single week, so over 100 every single month. And then if you add in shopping, it's even higher than that. And on that combined sum, we are a tiny fraction of what's actually available in addressable, which in some sense means that there's a large runway and opportunity for us to become even better in breed in terms of what it is that we can offer.

And if we can keep doing that, I think we're going to be just fine. I think that's why you see that -- you see it in our numbers. You see it in our growth rates, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. We were gaining share virtually in every single market, and we're growing at near historical highs pretty much in all of our geographies. And so I think that's happening even at the scale that we've developed over the last few years because we're continuing to build the best-in-breed experiences in our categories that have a very large runway for growth.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Morton with MoffettNathanson. Please go ahead.

Thank you for the question. One for Tony and then a quick one for Ravi. Kind of following up on what you were just speaking about, Tony, AI and partnerships. As the AI platforms become more capable, there is a concern from investors that like personal agents could layer themselves in between the on-demand marketplaces, and the consumer. I would love to know DASH's long-term strategic view on this. And if there's a risk to your business to becoming an API or a logistics offering to these? And why or why not you want to work with one of these third-party AI platforms?

And then a quick one for Ravi, as you've been operating dot for a bit now in some cities. Are you going to share any learnings about what percentage of the U.S. delivery market you think is addressable for AVs? And then maybe thoughts on how to incentivize consumers to come out and meet the dot or where the opportunity costs are around cost to serve with AV?

Michael, I'll start on your question related to agentic commerce and just kind of agents and whether or not there's any intermediation or disremediation risk. I mean, I really think like what's instructive here is what we've seen historically with all top of funnel programs. right, for at least a decade, you can argue companies like Google or Apple and many other large platforms were top-of-funnel drivers to a lot of different commerce platforms are included, say, for example, Google food ordering, which allows you to order through various Google channels, whether it's Google Maps, Google Search, I believe there are a few others, too, in which you can order restaurant delivery that started in the mid-2010s, and it went for about 8 years before they shut it down where you can order delivery from any one of these Google services.

And from a traffic perspective, they absolutely could drive a lot more traffic than virtually anyone else could to any one of these restaurants. Yet the retention of that traffic was a fraction of what platforms like DoorDash saw. And as a result, customers effectively moved all of their shopping experiences to DoorDash. And I would argue something similar happened with Amazon, where perhaps at the beginning of the 2010s, Amazon was not a leading player in the product search kind of category. But by the end of Amazon ended up owning a significant percentage of all product search terms related to commerce.

And -- you may ask me, why did that happen and what lessons can we learn or borrow from history, it's kind of instruct what's happening in this moment and in the years to come? What I would say is customers ultimately don't care about any top of funnel. DoorDash included or any of these agents. What they care about is, did they get the order that they wanted? Did they get the item that they actually were looking for? Did they get it in the best possible experience, that means in terms of price the speed, the timeliness of the accuracy. Obviously, if something were to go a right or wrong that it was fixed appropriately and quickly.

And when I look at it from the customer's perspective, they're going to ultimately judge us on the best end-to-end experience. And so -- and that's where we're focused on maniacal at DoorDash in which, we're not just trying to build genic ordering experiences on DoorDash to make the discovery or the search experience easier kind of echoing what I said on the previous question, but we're also building a catalog -- a digital catalog of structured information for the physical world, collecting where every banana or every ripe or unripe avocado to every size shoe in whatever color and style that a customer is looking for, all of that information about the physical world, of which there are billions of items, tens of million per city and getting that annotated and having that unique and proprietary to DoorDash in which we don't have to share with anybody.

And I think if we can do that and improve our discovery experience as time progresses, given the power of some of these objective tools I think we're going to be the best end-to-end shopping experience for customers. And ultimately, that's how we're going to get judged. I think that's the reason for why, for instance, even our restaurant delivery business, which is the oldest of the areas in which we operate continues to grow at above historical highs because we're constantly trying to build the best end-to-end experience and be best-of-breed in doing so.

So it doesn't mean we're perfect. We have a long ways to go, and it doesn't mean that it's a guarantee that we're going to be able to get there. But if we can keep executing like we have, I think the numbers will continue to speak for themselves. And these top of funnel players will be partners of ours in which they'll drive a small percentage of our traffic and a lot of that will be a choice that we'll have.

Michael, it's Ravi. On your second point around to, right, look, I mean I think we are very happy with the progress that we are making. Maybe I'll talk a little bit about the vision. Look, the vision for us is we are building an autonomous delivery platform. because ultimately, we think different formats are needed for different types of deliveries. That's how we build the most efficient network. We're obviously happy to partner with others. We're happy to build ourselves. I think there's going to be different formats, both on land as well as air that we are working on. we're early on this journey. We are scaling. And what we're trying to do is, obviously operate at scale manufacture at scale, that's going to be important for us.

We're seeing good results. We've launched it in a couple of markets. I think in terms of the end customer benefit because I think that was one part of your question, it's going to be a combination of the key things that we focus on, right? It's going to help us with speed. It's going to help us with quality, it's going to potentially help us with overall range of deliveries. But the key I would say is, the work that we are doing is starting to look good. We are early in our journey as well as the overall progress that we're making is going really well according to the plans that we made at the beginning of the year.

Yes. One thing, Michael, I'll add to the autonomy story that I think sometimes perhaps it's harder to see from the outside is that there's a pretty big difference between just shipping a vehicle or having a vehicle ready for a demonstration in a vehicle that can really operate at scale under any condition and is really battle tested, right? It's kind of like saying I can shoot a 3-point shot and so can [indiscernible], but one of us is the greatest shooter of all time, and one of us maybe hit them once in a while.

And this year for us, it's really climbing that curve for the autonomy program and making sure that we can harden our -- I mean, it's not just the autonomy, it's the autonomy, the hardware, the remote operations, all the work around regulatory with the different cities so that we can do this at scale and truly be the, again, best of breed. And I believe the only way you can really do that is if you actually get in there and do all of the things yourself. And so that's what's happening this year with DoorDash and also our broader autonomy program.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

As we get deeper into 2026, any updated views around either the depth the duration of some of the strategic investments, especially in the platform that we've talked about over the last couple of earnings calls. And more importantly, any updated views on how the tech replatforming might position you for different forms of innovation than you envisioned 6-plus months ago.

Sure. Eric, I'll start to add anything. Look, I think we talked about 2 calls ago that we are investing several hundred million dollars back into the platform. Obviously, the largest component of that is our global tech infrastructure stack. It's going well. The biggest component of that is just being able to design and map all the domains, which is what the team has done over the last several quarters. That part is done. Now we're focused on execution. We're starting to see production traffic go through. We are already starting to see some early benefits come through.

And I think on the cost side, Eric, which I think was the second part of your question, look, I talked about the fact that this was the biggest component of the investment that we're making. My view on the overall quantum of dollars that we are investing behind this has stayed the same. It's largely in line with what I had expected 2 quarters ago. And both the program from an execution perspective as well as a cost perspective is going well.

And finally, to your point around benefits of this, look, ultimately, the benefit is going to accrue in terms of us being able to do more, us being able to release features earlier. The future development velocity is going to improve, which will ultimately result in retention, order frequency and economics increasing. That was the goal for this. We're starting to see benefits, and I feel good about where the trajectory of the overall program is.

Yes. The 2 things around your second part of your question, Eric, that I'd add to what Ravi said about innovation is one is really around the velocity and the second is around the quality. So the velocity increases for the simple fact that instead of shipping one feature, which if we were to do it today, we'd have to ship 3 separate times across DoorDash, Volt and Deliveroo, we'd only have to do that once. That's the velocity comment.

But the second point is really around the quality in which we can see benefits. What we're doing by choosing to build a new tech stack versus, say, just replatforming a couple of different brands into the same tech stack that we currently have. is that you get to kind of take the best of breed experiences from different brands and different products and put them into a new product that all 3 get the benefit from.

For example, one of the things that we've learned is that there are different logistics challenges in places like London as an example, or cities in Europe that are a lot smaller, a lot tighter, not always perfectly gridded like some of the cities in the United States or in other parts of the world. Perhaps they were older cities historically, and therefore, they weren't really meant for driving under any circumstance or a condition in which you need different logistics approaches, and we can borrow and take the best of what we're seeing from our European operations and bring those over here to the U.S., whereas in the U.S., because we have larger physical geographies that travel longer distances, that have perhaps a greater retail network that has a larger catalog of items. Those are advances that we get to see that we get to port over to Europe.

And so -- that's what I mean by quality. And so I'm pretty excited about -- we're on track, which is great news when you're taking on a project as large and ambitious is the one that we're thinking about. But I'm very, very excited that not only are we already seeing some velocity and quality wins across all of the brands. But I think there will be a lot more to comment we actually roll this thing out.

Your next question comes on the line of Youssef Squali with Truist.

Maybe just following up on the prior question and maybe looking at it more from a competitive lens, can you maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing in Europe, in particular, maybe order in Europe with Uber becoming a little more aggressive. There is a line of thinking out there that maybe as you guys are going through your replatforming, it may make you potentially a little more vulnerable to competition. So maybe if you can comment on that.

And then, Ravi, thank you for quantifying the support to drivers for Q2. I think you said $50 million. Obviously, we don't know how long this thing is going to last. But is $50 million a good run rate to assume going out for the rest of the year, just assuming we have status quo on the macro environment?

Yes, I can take the first question, which is around kind of our competitive position in Europe. I mean, we've never been stronger as the short answer in Europe. I mean, if anything, Deliveroo is seeing the highest growth rate it has in the past 4 years. and it's actually been reaccelerating in growth each of the months in which we've been now operating at. Volt is seeing the highest share performance in each 1 of the countries in which we operate. But I think those are just outcome metrics. And candidly, they're not things that I stare at all the time. I mean what I'm looking at and said is kind of what I was saying in some of the earlier questions around what are the improvements that we're actually shipping for our different audiences?

If we're seeing logistics improvements, like how is that translating into lower wait times at different stores, higher accuracy of picking or faster delivery yield. And if we can continue executing the way that we have, I think the share performance, the reaccelerated growth, I think is only going to continue. And again, it goes to the DoorDash story, which is how do you build what's best in breed. And if you can continue building what's best in breed, I think customers will continue voting with their wallets and they're voting DoorDash.

Youssef, on the first one, I'll just question your premise because if you look at the underlying consumer input metrics, whether it's users order frequency, we talk a lot about subscription in the press release. Look, I mean, we are seeing accelerated growth in subscription. Users are growing -- we're gaining share in the majority of the markets that they're operating in. The other thing I would offer is if you actually look at the overall MAU growth in the industry, the majority of that is being driven by DoorDash. And that should tell you the business is doing really well, both from a demand as well as an underlying improvement in the customer metrics perspective, right?

To your second point around the impact from a gas rewards perspective, look roughly the impact of that is about $50 million in Q2. I'll say a couple of other things. we did have to find offsets in the business. We will push out some investments into the first half into the second half. Our goal is to make those investments in the second half of the year. To your second point around, are we going to extend it? Look, we've not made any decisions. Obviously, we'll monitor the situation very closely, and we'll do what's right for the business. But that said, my broader view on EBITDA for the full year has not changed.

Look last couple of quarters, I talked about the fact that I expect overall EBITDA margins were to be slightly higher compared to 25%, excluding Rue and do to produce roughly about $200 million of EBITDA. That view has remained very consistent. That view has not changed. If we do decide to extend the Gas Rewards program, we'll find offsets in other parts of the business. in order to make sure we still feel good from a top line as well as the bottom line perspective.

Your next question comes from the line of Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein.

Tony, in a world with, I guess, AI workloads and a more productive workforce, is your mental model for headcount growth and even organizational structure for DoorDash changing at all?

Yes, it's a really good question. I mean, like in short, I mean, the answer is yes. And the longer answer is we're trying to figure out what that really looks like. Because we're seeing, for instance, a lot of productivity gains right now from AI about well north of half of our code, as an example, probably closer to 2/3 of our code is written by AI today. But that doesn't alone kind of articulate how workflows and team setups ought to change, right? It means that we're being more productive, we're shipping more code. But the ultimate question I have is are we actually delivering better outcomes for customers. Because at the end of the day, that's the only thing that really matters.

And so we're in that period where we're seeing productivity gains. We're trying to figure out how do productivity gains now translate to what team setup should look like. That's the phase where we're at. And I think if we -- the top priority for us right now is definitely making sure that we can get all teams on to single tax stack. The second priority is to make sure that I think everyone in the company, not just the engineers, but everyone in the company I think, is as AI capable as anyone else. I think then we can start thinking about what are the actual workflows that have to change to actually truly deliver things faster.

Like right now, we're delivering features faster. We're delivering like projects faster, components faster. But I think the customer holds us to a higher bar than that, which is can you actually deliver outcomes much faster. And I think that's a tricky question that all companies, ourselves included, are wrestling with right now, and we'll figure it out.

Nikhil, it's Ravi. Just very similar to what Tony talked about. We are using it across the board. We are seeing productivity improvements. So the goal for us from a productivity improvement perspective, is just has always been, right? We want to do more with more. We want to try to drive more features. We want to do more for our audiences. We want to do more internally as well. Ultimately, the way we think about it is how do we channel the productivity improvements into ultimately developing more features, but if it's purely from a modeling perspective, Nikhil, that you're trying to think about it. Look, I would expect from a near-term model perspective for OpEx to roughly be in the 2% range that I've talked about before. We are being very judicious. We're being disciplined. Goal is to generate leverage on it just like any other part of the P&L over time.

That's helpful. And Ravi, if I could just follow up on, I guess, the order growth dynamics in Q1 as well. Could you just elaborate a bit on the deceleration there? Is that just weather? Or are there other things you want to call out? And how are you thinking about that as you think about the Q2 guidance you've given for GOV.

Yes. Look, I mean, Nikhil, the question broadly is around consumer demand on the platform. I mean, look, demand continues to be quite strong. The impact purely from a winner strong perspective is roughly about 1% on a year-over-year growth perspective from a GOV basis. Look, when I look at the underlying demand, Nikhil, it continues to be very good, right? We've talked about MAUs reaching an all-time high. Order frequency is growing, subscription had a record quarter, in fact, across the board across DoorDash delivery as well as gold. What we're seeing in the business is member growth has accelerated on a year-over-year basis. That follows last few quarters where the member growth has been quite healthy.

We're seeing that both from sign up as well as an overall retention perspective. When I look at the other parts of the business, look, we're gaining share. New verticals has continued to do well. We were volume share leaders in Q4. We've continued to extend that. Even across the board international, we touched on delivery acceleration as well as the rest of the international portfolio also growing. Q2 is off to a good start. I feel good about the demand patterns that we're seeing on the business.

Your next question comes from the line of Deepak Mathivanan with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Tony, so on groceries in the last few months, you've got a lot of new partners. Can you talk about the trends in the business broadly, maybe in terms of penetration, how use cases have evolved potentially some color on growth and maybe also where the unit economics have seen the biggest gains in? And then similarly, [indiscernible] fulfillment service is also another big area of focus this year. Where does it currently stand in terms of where you want the service to get to ultimately before it starts becoming another incremental key growth driver?

Yes. I mean those are related questions. So I mean, I'll start with just like where grocery is at today, which is -- I mean you kind of said it, which is -- it's pretty much at record highs for us, right? We were -- we became the share leaders by volume last fall and -- or last winter, and it's kind of continued to go in one direction, miss a lot of activity, I would say, in the field. And you're right. In part, it's because we have added a lot of grocers and we like the trajectory of the [indiscernible] we're at it. But we're also improving the service experience. So it's not just adding more and more selection. But I always ask myself, why is grocery not a lot bigger? Why shouldn't it be even bigger than, say, restaurant?

Well, it's because the online delivery experience is just not yet good enough compared to the off-line experience, right, of buying it for yourself. And -- but we're really closing that gap and the team deserves a ton of credit for making us a lot more accurate, making us a lot more affordable, making basket building a lot easier, making customer support better, making the experience easier for shoppers and a lot -- literally tens of thousands of little things over the last 6 or 7 years, I think, are accumulating.

But it's still, I think, reasons for me that over time, if you truly want to marry the best possible selection, which is every store inside your neighborhood with the best possible quality, which means every -- you get exactly the item you order without any substitutions or any changes and obviously, certainly no out-of-stocks for canceled items or canceled orders. I think you do have to work the fulfillment problem, which is where our Dash mark fulfillment services comes in.

And so there, we are trying to build an inventory management and fulfillment setup with all of the grocers and retail partners that we work with. And I think if we can do that, I think then finally, you can actually unlock what is truly a magical experience where it's more similar to restaurant delivery, where -- yes, there might be a small premium you pay, but at least you get exactly what you ordered, which is not the experience today.

In terms of where Dash mark fulfillment services is -- we -- I mean we're doing it with a handful of grocery and retail partners today. That's kind of where it is. And if you think about that journey, I mean, we're trying to work with grocers and retailers who, for decades now are used to running their supply chains and their stores in one particular way. Now we're introducing a second way. And so there's a lot of things that you have to figure out. In terms of technology, people, processes, the interaction of business models and kind of everything in between.

We like what we see with a handful of partners we have, but kind of in the spirit of all things at DoorDash really where we really want to make sure we nail the experience before we scale it because I think this is both quite disruptive in a positive way to the customer experience. It's also quite disruptive to how retailers are used to working and buying and running their own businesses for so many decades. that we have to make sure that we get it fully right end to end, and then we can replicate the playbook.

Deepak, on the unit economic side, I think that was part of your question, look, we made a lot of good progress. Last call, I made the point that we expect the overall new vertical portfolio to be gross profit positive in the second half. We are trending well towards that. Look, we're not worried about what the profitability profile of this business looks like. It's something we understand quite well and what we need to do. It's like there's any structural change that we need to make happen. It's just continued execution on a number of lines and on the P&L. What we're truly focused on is how do we scale the business. In Q4, we talked about the fact that about 30% of our monthly active users order from categories outside of the restaurant, we truly think that could be 100% over time. and that's going to come with a lot of improvements in selection, quality, improving the underlying product.

And when I look at the underlying consumer metrics, I mean, look, order frequency is improved, masked sizes for mature or are continuing to improve, which means that people are using us for more use cases. And over time, what we're seeing is the underlying order rate also continues to improve. These are all good signs, which is driving both the growth as well as the improvement in scale, which will ultimately drive the unit economics in the business as well.

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Beck with Raymond James.

Yes. Maybe more on the cost side. Rob, you kind of mentioned the $50 million gross cost as you kind of look to find relief for those investments, maybe what are some of the big topics that you're kind of looking to uncover there? And then going to your -- some of your points on new verticals, certainly a very nice watermark to achieve gross profit breakeven. To get to the next milestone, what are going to be some of the really important elements? I mean, generically, it seems like within new verticals, advertising is a bit more of a weighting factor there. So just kind of curious how we think about maybe some of the real important drivers beyond where we're scale moved to the second half.

Josh, I'll take the first one. Tony, why don't you take the second one. Look, I think, Josh, your broader question is around costs. gas rewards and impact on the model for the rest of the year, if I understood it correctly. Look, the impact -- I'll talk more broadly, right? Q1, we obviously had the impact from both veterans as well as the introduction of gas towards we did extend the Gas Rewards program. The rough impact of that in Q1 was about $50 million. The projection for the impact in Q2 is also going to be about $50 million. Like I said earlier, we did find offsets in the business. Look, for us, it's a very dynamically managed business, right? We take our plans very seriously. We look at input metrics to make sure we're doing the right investments.

We did have to push out some investments in each one in order to make room for this. and my expectation and were fully convicted that we are going to make these investments in the second half of the year. If we do decide to extend the program, our goal is to find assets just like we did in H1, but my view on the full year EBITDA has not changed. Look, what we've said about a couple of quarters ago is, overall, 2026 EBITDA margin is going to be higher slightly compared to '25 excluding rule. That view still stands. When I look at the trajectory of the business, I would expect second half EBITDA almost to be higher than first half. second half EBITDA margins to be higher than the first half, largely similar to what I had expected at the beginning of the year. Overall, right here, when we sit, like we look pretty good from a bottom line perspective for the rest of the year as well as the demand on the platform continues to be strong as well.

Yes. And with respect to your second question about what else do we need to do to make -- to achieve higher levels of profitability within grocery. I mean, the short answer is more of the same, which is there are -- we're not trying to rely on any one source of revenue like ads, for example, to make grocery profitable. We don't need to. We fundamentally have created, we believe, a lower cost structure that allows us to make grocery delivery profitable. But it's just not good enough yet, right? I mean, if you think about it from the perspective of the customer, not the perspective of our P&L, we still need to be more accurate. We still need to have more items available even from existing stores, and we need to do it at better and better price points.

And I think if we keep doing that, I mean, you already see in our cohort behavior, it's not true for all across the business because we're still gaining a lot of new customers. In fact, we gained about 1 in every 2 new customers that comes into the industry for grocery delivery for the first time. But you see with cohorts over time that they actually buy bigger and bigger baskets and achieve the profitability milestones without any unnatural shall we say, or overreliance on any one cost or revenue driver. And so that tells me that at current course and speed, will get there. And the question is like, how do you get there faster?

But perhaps most importantly, how do you actually unlock a much bigger industry mean grocery delivery fundamentally should be as large, if not larger, than restaurant delivery. It's just that the product isn't good enough yet. And so if we can -- we already are leading from what we've been told by some of the top grocers in the country in terms of quality, but we still think there's miles to go. Perhaps we brought some innovations to the market. But we think that we have to keep innovating on all things, accuracy, price points, and we have some interesting ideas on how to do that. But we don't have to do anything on natural or over rely or perhaps even rely at all on any source of -- any one line item to make the math work.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley.

I have 2. The first one, Tony, in the letter, you talked about making some new tools that helped design that were to streamline the merchant onboarding process. Can you just sort of talk to us about areas you've made the most progress in bringing on new merchants and sort of more inventory per merchant, and what are some of the technological advancements you're still looking to make to really make that easier to get more of those bananas and avocados that you talked about earlier and even carving knife.

And then, Ravi, one for you just on the replatforming, that you say that you have live production traffic ramping up across all 3 of the global marketplace brands. Does that mean that you're sort of running all 3 tech stacks now. So we're burdening the P&L with the MAX costs and then we should start to turn some of those off in the back half? Or how does this sort of triple platforming down to one platform and time line work?

Yes. I'll take the first one, Brian. Yes. So -- you're right. We continue to ship a lot of different tools to make it a lot easier to work with us or a lot easier for customers to find what they're looking for or dashers to perform deliveries. On the specific question with respect to the merchant tools, A lot of what I found AI to be helpful, especially now with more powerful models that can reason in a multiterm kind of fashion is that you can start looking at repetitive processes that kind of are stitched together and actually get them done with perfect quality every single time, and you can actually do that with just an agent. Whereas, I would say, even perhaps 6 to 8 months ago, this was even less true because you would kind of need to build a lot of backup or redundant systems to kind of make sure that agents don't just kind of go off the rails and actually can finish the task.

And so that has happened with something like what you said with onboarding as an example, where whether it's helping you with your menu or your catalog as a restaurant or a retailer or with your photos and your metadata and kind of the annotation of that data. All of these things are effectively repetitive tasks, if you will, in which you can create agents and stitch them together and to do that in a really, really productive way. And I think like with all things, the removal of friction increases activity and activity -- increased activity increases the business that we get to do together, and that's kind of what we're seeing with. So we are already seeing benefits to the P&L from some of the AI work that we're doing.

Some of it is on our own products like the ordering agent stuff I mentioned on a separate question and some of it is on tools that you're talking about, whether it's related to merchants or customer support or dashers. So we're already seeing that. And with respect to like things we still have to do, you're mentioning about like all the inventory inside of a city. Well, we still are just a tiny fraction of all items sold or even represented, I would argue today, DoorDash is the collective. And that's becoming more interesting now as some of those items are also different when it's an in-store shopping experience, for example, right?

Some restaurants, as an example, offer different in-store products and experiences and services that they don't offer in the kind of takeaway or in the offline world. And so there's a lot of things we have to document. That's one thing we have to go and do. The second we have to go and do is build structure and cleanliness out of what is inherently very messy and constantly changing, which is a challenge, I would argue. But if we can do both of those things across every 1 of the categories, as we kind of march from restaurants to grocery to different categories within retail and to do that through the merchant channel, online, the DoorDash channel online and the merchants channel off-line or in-store I think that just builds a really rich data set that's kind of a nonexistent anywhere, be extremely valuable for the merchant to have a full view of all the different types of customers that they may want for different occasions and c, I think, really interesting opportunities also for DoorDash to build both products as well as businesses.

Brian, on your second question around the global tech stake, right? I'll make 2 broad points and I'll get into the P&L dynamic question. Look, I mean, I think the team has done an incredible job. And this is a massive project. I have to give kudos to the team is going according to plan. Really happy with the progress that we're making. Even on the cost side, my view on the overall cost has been very similar to what I talked about last 2 quarters ago. So both on progress as well as costs, I feel very good about where it is. I think you have point around the mechanics of the P&L, look, I think I talked about the fact that there is a portion of the spend, which is redundant in the sense that we are going to run all 3 tech stacks in parallel while we're working on the global new tech stack. That is going to phase in, it's going to phase out. My expectation is majority of that will run through '26, maybe some portion will bleed into early 2027, but that will bleed out. And hopefully, that should give you a mechanic of how the rest of the P&L is going to work for the rest of the year.

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Patterson with KeyBanc.

Great. I thought you recently launched a workplace catering for DoorDash for business. Can you talk more about how you're thinking about that opportunity? And what do you see as some of the key challenges towards scaling this?

Sure. DoorDash for business, I think, is off to a very, very great start. And it's actually only something that we've really recently focused on in the last few years. But DoorDash for business really is a set of -- or a suite of a few products -- and there's really 3. You talked about one of them, which is catering. There's also meal manager and then there's also corporate solutions related to DashPass, as well as group ordering. And the idea is, when you're a company or an organization doesn't have to be a company, it could be a nonprofit or a government institution or a school, as long as you're serving multiple different use cases, sometimes it's a group meeting with just a few of us, perhaps sometimes you're hosting an event in which you need catering. Sometimes you need individual meals as kind of your sales teams perhaps travel to do different things or client demos, things like this, you're going to want to work with one place ideally, which you can see everything in one view and offer your organization the best-in-breed selection, price and quality.

And because we offer what we believe is the best of in-breed in price selection, quality and service, DoorDash as for business is kind of naturally growing really very, very quickly. So that's something that we're doing. But I think the biggest challenge to your question around something like catering is it's really how do you solve the kind of perennial hard problem. -- of cooking for a large group of people. It sounds really simple. But if you think about it, as you cook for yourself and then you start adding the number of guests around the table. I would argue that logistics problem is a bit of an exponentially difficult problem as you kind of increase the count of guests.

And so the challenges are numerous. It starts with understanding, well, things around kitchen capacity, then understanding things around menu design, then understanding things around staffing, then understanding things around the logistics operations. And we kind of have to do all of that. And I think to actually truly create the industry, because I think the industry by itself is perhaps somewhat limited because not every restaurant is built as a manufacturing facility that can actually cook up to the needs of a larger organization or even a team of people, it's really working hand-in-hand with merchants and dashers together to co-create that solution and hopefully create a very large industry.

Your next question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley with Mizuho.

Wondering if you can give us an update on what you're seeing in the ads business on about the 1P basis and syndicating ads outside of DASH. And then second one, Tony, earlier, you talked about miles to go in terms of improving the user experience in grocery. Just wondering if you can elaborate on some of the things you're doing if you found any big unlocks or anticipate any big unlocks to kind of drive a step function improvement in the grocery experience that can help you guys penetrate deeper with your customers?

Sure. maybe I can take both and feel free to add in, Ravi. I mean on the ads question, it's never gone better for us in the world of ads. As is at a record high, continue to grow extremely fast compared to any previous year. And I think the kind of the recent trajectory or kind of continued strong trajectory really comes from the fact that our team deserves a [indiscernible] and cracking the code not just in solving problems for SMBs, whether they be restaurants or retailers but also larger advertisers, both in the restaurant world as well as in the retail world. And then the other unlock has been cracking the code on CPG advertisers, where I think just there's no one thing. It's like a relentless checklist of just making the product a lot better for advertisers and delivering upon 2 -- I mean, really competing objectives.

One is you have to deliver the best return on ad spend for advertisers, which we do. And the second is you have to deliver the best consumer experience where you don't span people. And I think we have a much lower ad load than some other platforms. And I think the teams have been just working really, really hard to balance those 2 competing objectives. And then -- so I think the opportunity besides kind of scaling some of the unblocks and ads as well as discovering some of the kind of off-site stuff that you're talking about, which also includes things around all of our in-store activities in addition to our work just buying on half of advertisers off of DoorDash. I think there's a very large runway for the ads business.

I think your second question was about just the early innings of grocery. I mean, we've been at grocery for about 5 years now. And yes, I'm, on the one hand, super proud of the team and becoming the volume leader in which consumers both shop on as well as new consumers find out about grocery delivery for the first time. But on the other hand, yes, I actually do stand by the statement that we are miles to go on building an experience that I think can outcompete you going into a grocery store and buying the items yourself because that is still the winning product. If you just look at all of the data out there.

It doesn't mean that we're not growing extremely fast. It does not mean that we're making a lot of improvements. It does not mean that we're not gaining share and doing so and improving the profitability while we do it, but I think there's a lot of work to do. So a lot of the work has to do with just continuing to build a cost structure that allows you to offer items at around the same price as in store and delivering with perfect quality. I think the hardest problem to solve in grocery is that because consumers, all of us when we go into grocery stores and move items around and because of how supply chains and inventory systems and payment systems don't necessarily always talk to each other and kind of how grocery stores are run and how they were built both historically and then as well as they made the move into e-commerce it's really hard for them to know where things are. And that's still the fundamental problem to solve.

And so we've done lots of things already in that space that were -- that we've pioneered and are really proud about. There's a long ways to go on just scaling that work to all of the stores in which we work with, not just the ones in which we've tested. But we also have to kind of do the next cell climb, if you will. to make sure that we can again achieve perfect quality at the prices that you would expect and be happy to pay and do it for every single item every single time.

And Lloyd, on your first question on ads, right? Like the question is around -- if you're thinking about it from a flow-through perspective, look, it's growing, it's obviously having an impact from a margin as well as a profitability perspective. But the way we think about that is very similar to how we think about the rest of the business, right? And that dollar is very similar to how we think about improvements which generates from unit economics. Ultimately, the goal for us as operators is to find opportunities to reinvest that back in the business ultimately to drive long-term free cash flow production. And that's largely what we're doing with advertising or any other efficiency that we generate in the business.

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America.

I just want to follow up on advertising. How do you think about integrating that with agentic capabilities on your own platform? And is there any way you could generate ad revenues on agentic platforms on other platforms?

I'll take that. Well, ads are just some means to connect consumers with merchants who are hoping to be discovered and making sure that you do that in the perfect possible way. So with respect to agentic commerce, I mean that's just one way of shopping. And so I don't think it will change in terms of our ability to advertise. It may increase some of the opportunities in surface areas, but I think a lot of that remains to be seen just as -- I don't think the ideal agentic shopping experience is just going to be a chat system. I think it's going to take on various forms, and we're iterating on that.

I think with respect to what happens with ads on third-party agentic sites, I think you'll have to ask them.

And this concludes today's Q&A session. This also concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect. Goodbye.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the DoorDash Q4 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]. I will now hand the call over to Weston Twigg. Please go ahead.

All right. Thanks, Elizabeth. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our Q4 2025 earnings call. I'm pleased to be joined today by Co-Founder, Chair and CEO, Tony Xu; and CFO, Ravi Inukonda. We'll be making forward-looking statements during today's call, including, without limitation, our expectations for our business, financial position, operating performance, profitability, our guidance, strategies, capital allocation approach and the broader economic environment.

Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Many of these uncertainties are described in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q, should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events or performance. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures may be found in our earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.doordash.com. A non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results and are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Finally, this call is being audio webcasted on our Investor Relations website. An audio replay of the call will be available on our website shortly after the call.

Operator, I'll pass it back to you, and we can take our first question.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

Let me try 2, please. One is on competitive intensity globally and specifically in Europe, if you're seeing anything different -- and if so, it hasn't been rising. And then second is on investments. This may be for Ravi, how should we be thinking there's a lot of maybe debate that's going on in terms of the level of investments not only in 2026, but to the degree that it may continue into 2027, especially as it relates to [indiscernible] platform. So could you please probably help us think through how we should think about it? Is it a onetime in '26 or should we expect some elevated level of spend in '27. Because it could bleed into next year?

I'll start by talking about Europe. Overall, we feel really great about our position in Europe. We're the leading player in many of the countries in that continent. And we're off to a really great start with our Deliveroo acquisition.

With respect to Deliveroo, we are growing much faster at the same profit contribution that we expected before the acquisition. We're gaining share in its largest markets. We're doing the same on the Bolt side. And so when I overall look at our business outside of the U.S., what I see is faster growth than what we see in the U.S., which, by the way, the U.S. had 2 of the fastest-growing quarters in 2025 in the last 4 years.

So to trump that is actually quite impressive. And we're continuing to improve our unit economics across the board. So I feel really strong about our position overseas.

Shweta, on your second point, like I'll make a couple of points. One, my expectation for the full year EBITDA for '26 has not changed since the last call. The way I think about it is 2026 EBITDA margin is going to be up slightly compared to 2025, excluding [indiscernible]. and [indiscernible] to produce about $200 million of EBITDA, like we said. So that remains very consistent. Look, as we're thinking about investing, there's 3 major part of investing that we called out. The quantum of investment dollars is also very similar to what I had expected at the time of the last call. One of the major areas suspend, as you called out, is our global tech stack.

Look, we're happy with the progress. We're making good progress there. There are components of that spend that are redundant, especially as we take on the cost of running both [ tech tax ] in parallel. Majority of that should be in '26, some of that will be in '27, which will come off, but that's a smaller component of the overall spend. The other two areas are both autonomy as well as merchant services. We are expanding both of those areas, we are investing. We like what we are seeing there.

And in fact, I mean, if we continue to make more progress from a customer benefit perspective, our goal is to continue to invest more. So I mean, our goal has always been to maximize long-term free cash flow. We believe these investments are the right investments, especially as we think about becoming the operating system for local commerce. As we make more progress, we'll continue to invest behind them because ultimately, they lead to more areas where we can invest behind as well as improve overall free cash flow generation.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Morton with MoffettNathanson.

Maybe one for Tony to start -- in the press release, you talked about investing to support growth in longer distance and higher effort deliveries. I was wondering if you could provide some more details on what type of deliveries those are related to? And just following up on that, like Dash has made a lot of investments in DashMart and DashLink. And Tony, I'd love to hear maybe if it's related to that longer distance investment, but how you see the e-commerce landscape evolving? Do you expect to see local inventory worked more into the kind of consumer shopping experiences and anything around that would be great.

And then maybe a quick one for Ravi. I love the commentary on the inflection in unit economics for your new verticals business. Could you speak a little bit about some of the drivers of that improvement? Is it scale and also maybe last investment requirement. Anything in that would be great, too.

Yes, I'll start. On the question with respect to Dashers and the evolution around what DoorDash is doing in the world of commerce. I mean I think Ravi kind of touched nicely about this on the previous question about how we're building the operating system for local commerce.

And so I'll maybe take a couple of minutes to expand upon that a little bit, and then I'll answer directly your question about how Dashers and frankly, some of our other audiences play into this broader ecosystem. When I think about like what it's going to be required in order to allow all the small, medium and large physical businesses to become omnichannel businesses and compete against 1 or 2 large the heads. It's going to require software. It's going to require warehousing and physical infrastructure. It's going to require the lowest cost of delivery at the highest quality and it's going to require amazing software. And if you think about a lot of what we announced actually in 2025 at our Dashboard product event in September, as well as the investments we're making into '26. I think they line up nicely to give you a view of what we're building.

So if you think about it, we're starting by obviously building software for every small, medium and physical -- and large physical business, whether that means helping them and adding them into the DoorDash app. One of the things that we've been seeing is just continued growth across all categories at DoorDash now around 30% of customers are ordering outside of the restaurant category, especially as we broaden our reach into grocery, retail, where we've become the leading third-party transaction platform in the U.S., and we're growing very, very fast outside of the U.S. as well in that dimension.

So we bring software in that dimension. We're bringing software also in the dimension of all of the B2B products we're shipping, where we're helping businesses offer delivery through their own channels. We're helping businesses also stand up their own e-commerce solutions. We're building warehouses to bring inventory closer to where consumers live.

So we announced DashMart Fulfillment Services last September. We're very excited to be partnering with companies like Kroger or CVS to really offer the highest possible quality, the perfect inventory accuracy at the lowest cost and the fastest speeds so that they can compete and offer same-hour, same-day delivery against their peers. That's something that we're doing. And we're also investing in how to do this in the future, right? And that's really our investment into autonomous vehicles where we announced DoorDash Dot as well as some other projects that we're working on in order to make sure that no physical business will be at a disadvantage when it comes to offering the best possible delivery experience at the lowest possible cost.

So when you think about how Dashers kind of fit into the system, one of the things that has to be true and that is true, I mean, it's been happening throughout last year, the years before and obviously this year and into the future is that [ Dashers ] have more choice in terms of the types of orders they can take on. And that's why one of the investments we're making this year is actually directly into Dashers. So that as they do more types of grocery retail orders, which can travel longer distances, which are usually more complicated because there's a shopping nature involved, although not always, but because of the greater complexity, we want to make sure that the pay models reflect that. We want to make sure that the app experience actually reflects that. And there's a lot that we're also doing in cataloging all of the physical information that exists nowhere on the Internet that we're also partnering with Dashers to do as well. So there's a lot of things that we're building, but we're building all the fundamental building blocks at the end of the day, to enable local commerce so that for consumers, they can get anything inside the city delivered to them at the best possible experience at the lowest possible price.

Michael, on your broader question around new verticals, right, our retail and grocery business, maybe I'll zoom out and just talk about the performance and what we're seeing in that business. Look, I mean, new verticals had a really strong quarter as well as the year. We are the fastest growing in the U.S. as it relates to third-party peers.

Look, today, Tony mentioned the fact that 30% of our miles in the U.S. order from categories outside of restaurants. And our focus has always been how do you get that 30% to be 100% over [indiscernible]. And what we're seeing is that we improve selection as we are investing behind making the product better, whether it's quality affordability, more and more of our [ mouths ] continue to order from categories outside of restaurants.

In fact, the number of new consumers that join and start their journey with new verticals is also improving on a year-over-year basis. At the same time, we've been focused on improving the efficiency of the business. And look, when I look at the profitability, I mean, the team has made really good progress in unit economics year-over-year. I expect our entire retail and grocery business to be economic positive in the second half of the year.

And look, when I look at that, I mean, it's just continued execution, right? It's a combination of steady progress that we're going to make over a bunch of different fundamentals, whether it's scale, density continue to improve the efficiency on the logistics side, basket sizes are getting larger. There's no one thing, which is a step function change. It's continued execution, finding basis points, largely how we operate our entire business and our primary focus continues to be, hey, how do you actually get the business to scale. You know exactly what we need to do on the economic side. How do we get 100% of our [indiscernible] to use gross detail. That's the real focus that we've had as a team.

Your next question comes from the line of Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein.

Tony, I wanted to ask about agentic commerce and where you see things going longer term. I think today, it's clear that Dash has very strong direct relationships with consumers. And even with where things currently stand with AI chatbot experiences, that feels well intact. But there is a debate around how this might change in an agentic future where search, discovery, transaction flows start to compress and get more automated. You might still be part of the transaction, but perhaps the economics look different is the debate.

So how do you think about position in DoorDash for that future as consumer behavior evolves. Do you want to integrate with third parties? Does it make more sense to double down on your own vertical solutions maybe you disagree with that altogether and think Agentic AI upside as a broad premise. So just curious for any thoughts you have on that?

Sure. No, I think it's a great question. And -- the first thing I always come to when it comes to any new technology, whether it's autonomous vehicles or Agentic Commerce, and kind of how that interacts with LLMs, it's really how well does it solve the end-to-end job for customer kind of becomes the lens in which I approach all of these things. And I actually think that maybe the best way to think about this is to look a bit through history and maybe offer you a couple of examples and then maybe work our way towards the present and think about the future.

So when I think about these terrific products, whichever chat assistance that you love using or just protocols with agentic commerce that you like using I kind of view them very much as almost like the new forms of the Googles or other large kind of top-of-funnel channels, if you will. And -- and if you think about -- I'll give you a couple of examples from history that kind of maybe touch on your question.

One is, look at what happened to product search over the 2010. You saw over time, companies like Amazon take increasing share of product search from traditional search engines because they did the end-to-end job for customers because searching to buy an item is only one tax, but perhaps reading reviews or tracking the package or returning the package or any other form of customer support are also part of the end-to-end job that you have to solve for customers. And over that decade, you saw, I think, companies like Amazon and others take increasing share when it comes to something like product search.

Another example that comes to mind and maybe closer to home, is something that actually Google launched was called Google food ordering, which they launched in, I believe it was like 2016 or something like this, where they offer the ability for restaurants to offer delivery directly through Google Maps and other Google surfaces. And look, they drove the ton of traffic, multiple full traffic of what DoorDash could generate to these restaurants. But when you looked at the retention and the frequency of use of that channel versus companies like DoorDash, it really was a fraction of what DoorDash could provide. Why is that? Well, because after a checkout, things can happen in the physical world. For example, a driver might be late or an item might be missing or some substitution on a spoiled carton of mill needs to be made or not the exact brand of whatever produce that a customer was looking for needs to be changed.

So the end-to-end job at the end of the day, I think, is how customers will ultimately judge where they do their shopping. And at the end of the day, wherever the customers keep going back to, that's where the audiences will flow and where the audiences flow so will the advertiser budgets as well as the interest along that mentioned. And so when I put all this into perspective, the historical context into where I look at DoorDash today, I think DoorDash is really well positioned because we're actually solving the end-to-end job for a customer, which is to get them some item, brought them in the condition they expect on time every time. that's actually really hard to do. You got to map the physical world, all of which that information does not exist anywhere on the Internet. That's data that DoorDash has to collect in a proprietary way. You have to actually be excellent at the execution of the operations, you have to be excellent at collecting all the meta data as well for all of these different items as well as the personalization you can perform if you actually have all of the customers and all of the customer information and I think when you put it all together, we're going to be the best place to solve the end-to-end job for customers. And so long as we are that best place, we will also attract all of the audience and all of the advertiser dollars that comes from that audience. But look, I think with respect to how that informs our partnerships with some of these AI systems, I view them as channel partners and we'll see how much traffic they can drive in a very similar way to how companies like Facebook and Google did the same for DoorDash in the past.

Your next question comes from the line of Deepak Mathivanan with Cantor Fitzgerald.

One for Tony and one for Ravi. Tony, can you talk about the strategy with the autonomous delivery platform what do you think this platform looks like in 2 to 3 years, perhaps between first-party efforts with Dot and maybe through -- and also with some of the other third-party partnerships. And then for Ravi, can you elaborate on the reasons why the unit economics improvement in the core U.S. restaurant business will be lower this year than prior years. Is that from maybe slower advertising growth due to scale or perhaps moderation and some efficiency gains or maybe reinvestments. Can you expand on that, if you don't mind?

Yes. Deepak on [indiscernible] you're absolutely right that the [indiscernible] delivery platform is probably the most valuable part of what we're building because the way I kind of view it is that in the future, there will be a collection of different vehicles, a fleet of different vehicles, both by land and by air, some of which we'll build inside our 4 walls and others of which we will partner and I think the most important part is actually playing the orchestration of all of the activity and movement and the handoffs because it's not going to be immediately or at least not immediately obvious to me that autonomous vehicles are going to perform every single type of delivery. There are certain times where you're going to see handoffs between Dashers and AVs. At other times, you're going to see AVs perform deliveries that Dashers don't want to do.

At other times, you're going to see Dashers perform deliveries that AVs are not well equipped to do. And so it's really the kind of goal for '26 then is really to figure out what are all of these different use cases. Where can we apply the most pragmatic business impact and customer impact immediately. We're doing that right now in a couple of different markets. So we actually have real live deliveries happening right now with AVsand we're very excited about the future.

Maybe, Deepak, on the U.S. restaurant point, maybe I'll give you like a slightly broader answer. Look when I look at the performance of the U.S. restaurant business, it continues to be quite strong. In fact, in Q4, the contribution margin for the U.S. restaurant business was up on a year-over-year basis. And I do expect us to continue to improve margins in 2026. When I look at the last few years, I mean, growth has been quite strong. In fact, in '25 the restaurant business grew faster at a larger scale compared to 2024. And even when I look at the efficiency that we've driven over the last 3 or 4 years, it's been quite good.

We've driven improvements in margin. Dashers costs have become more efficient, C&R has become more efficient. We've driven leverage in sales and marketing, like you called out, ads is becoming a larger portion of the overall business. And we're still continuing to invest behind that business, whether it's selection, quality, affordability -- as I look ahead, I do expect us to continue to improve margins, albeit it will be at a lower pace compared to prior years.

Some of that is going to come from DashPass. As you know, DashPass had a record year as well as a record quarter. DashPass is going to have an impact on margin. But look, overall, the ROI is strong because profit dollar production is going to be high, largely because it's very simple, subscribers retain more, they order more, which means that they produce more gross profit dollars.

Look, our focus has always been on overall profit dollar production, which continues to be quite strong. And when I look at the top line and the bottom line of the restaurant business both continue to be very healthy.

Your next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali with Trust Securities.

Great. Maybe, Tony, just a question on competition again. But maybe from a grocery and perishables perspective. So as Amazon is doubling down on those categories, can you maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of your growth within that category in Q4? And have you seen any changes in the competitive landscape so far? And then, Ravi, on the headwinds to Q1 margins, can you just help us kind of quantify the impact of the higher Dashers costs. And I know there's a seasonal effect there, but is it more seasonal this year than in prior years or is just normal seasonality?

On the first question regarding grocery. In short, no, we haven't seen an impact on our growth. In fact, we continued very high growth rates kind of as fast as we've seen in the grocery sector, not just in Q4 but also for this year as well. And I think if you think about perhaps why we continue to see fast growth. I think there are a few points.

The first thing I would say is, if you think about what we're trying to create, we're trying to create a world in which there's the maximal amount of choice for what customers can get delivered. And that includes all of the grocers. There's a reason why there exists tens of thousands of supermarkets in the U.S., not just because it's a large geography, it's because the average customer does buy from a couple of different places when it comes to their groceries, whether it's buying from place A for their meat and fish, place B for their produce, place C for their pantry items, place D for some specialty items, et cetera. And I think DoorDash is a place in which you can get all of this at the best possible price and the highest quality of delivery. And so that's, I think, our angle at it where we think that in the future, so long as you believe that customers are going to want choice, and I think that can well reasoned when you just look at the landscape of grocery and how there exists so many grocers out there, which indicates that I think consumers prefer choice, then that will continue to be very strong interest in the DoorDash product.

And then especially if you add some of the capabilities that we're adding where we're adding fulfillment services with DashMark fulfillment service, where we're increasing the quality and doing that for every single grocer so that they have the capability to compete against companies like Amazon, I think that just bolsters the product offering.

Youssef on your second point, I think it was on Q1 EBITDA as well as Dashers. Look, I mean, I think there's a couple of factors in Q1. One, it's just phasing of investment, which is somewhat unique this year in the sense that we are investing in [indiscernible]. Some of that investment is front loaded. I expect Q1 EBITDA from [indiscernible] be about $25 million lower than Q4, but the full year number is still $200 million, which stays very consistent.

The second part is there was an impact because of the winter storms in January, that's roughly about $20 million. And finally, to your point, Dashers has been very seasonal, right? Like we saw seasonal impact of Dashers in Q1, every single year over the last several years, 2023, '24, '25, '26, I would expect it to be very similar. But your second point around your broader Dasher. I mean, Dasher trends fairly consistent with what we've seen in Espire, when I look at Dashers cost as a percentage of GOV, we generated leverage in Q4 on a year-over-year basis and I expect us to continue to generate some leverage in Q1 as well when I look at it as a percentage of GOB on a year-over-year basis.

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Beck with Raymond James.

Yes. I wanted to ask, I know it's only been maybe about 5 months since you've closed Deliveroo. Have there been any standout learnings when you think about the loyalty program or the fulfillment network or merchant terms, just anything that has really jumped out to you as an opportunity area to lean in towards and then on the platform modernization, I know it's arguably very early there as well. But anything you can update us on in terms of maybe some of the efficiencies that you're expecting to gain and maybe how that could either accelerate velocity or maybe free up investments elsewhere? Just would really like updates on those topics.

Sure. Josh, it's Tony. I'll maybe take a crack at both questions, and feel free to jump in, Ravi. On Deliveroo, I think to kind of echo what we said on the call so far, it's just been a great start. I mean, like I think the numbers and the performance speaks for itself, whenever you're growing faster at the same budget, and you see more room for upside.

I think that's always a great place to start. With respect to opportunities to improve, yes, I agree. There's a ton of things we kind of have identified. I think we'll be able to ship many things, this -- I mean, frankly, this quarter to be able to improve. And it's really just across the board. I mean, when I look at these kinds of businesses, it's really a bunch of small things that add up to make the difference. There's never like one glaring huge thing because usually when there is that's a very -- actually quite simple fix. It's usually the combined sum of lots of small things that compound that ultimately is what allows us to offer surplus to customers or a deficit and fail at delivering what the customers want. And so we see opportunity pretty much across the board and we're shipping things literally every single day to improve them.

So we've already seen benefits from things that we've taken from our lessons learned at building DoorDash at acquiring Wolt and have shipped those to our audiences over delivery to see improvements in all of the audiences. On the second question with respect to the tech platform, you're completely right in the high -- in the kind of premise of the question where I believe right now, if you think about our setup, it's really not ideal.

We have -- we operate on 3 tech platforms pretty much a very similar business. And that -- what does that mean? That means that you're going to be slowed down because in order to ship one feature, you have to ship that 3x in slightly different tool calls and kind of processes that make no sense. And so -- what we're doing is we're making this pretty big investment in order to both improve the velocity in which we ship as kind of -- to clear out some of the inefficiencies that I described and also just be more efficient with our global footprint, right? And I think we'll be able to do both of those things as a result of building this tech platform.

But I think above all else, actually, we've already seen this kind of play out nicely in the 4 months that we've worked together with Deliveroo where -- when we do ship something that has worked in the U.S. for us, or in another part of Europe with Wolt to Deliveroo, it has added immediate impact to the customer audience. And we see hundreds of those opportunities in the platform work that we're doing, moving everyone into the single tech stack that I think customers across all audiences will benefit.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

With respect to DashPass, how does that within your broader strategic priorities when you think about growth investments in the business in terms of incenting DashPass adoption more broadly across your markets and then in terms of DashPass adoption, how do you think about that as a potential stimulant for order frequency when you think about cohort evolution looking out over the next 12 to 18 months?

Eric, it's Tony -- maybe start on DashPass, and feel free to add in, Ravi. I mean DashPass is critical to our business. If you look at this program, it's a program that we started -- at the end of 2017, really shifted in 2018, and it's continued to be the core driver of our relationship with consumers. And I think it's grown and leave some [indiscernible] not just in some of the numbers that we've reported, but also in terms of the benefits that we're starting to ship to customers. And our goal right with DashPass is to continue to increase the number of benefits in which we can offer. And we think there's a lot to do. For example, a lot of the benefits that you've seen recently has occurred as we've launched all of our non-restaurant categories, Right? We are effectively charging the same fee for DashPass, we're adding even more value to get discounted or preferential pricing delivery for more complicated deliveries in retail and grocery and more valued discounts on key value items, things like this.

Another potential area that we see a ton of opportunity is all of the work that we're doing with our in-store business. We announced our in-store business in '25 during the September dashboard product event, where we're starting to drive traffic inside the restaurants now with our 56 million MAUs are over 100 million annual customers and offering them either access or value to restaurants that they couldn't get otherwise if they were not members. And so I think the DashPass ecosystem has a long runway ahead of it. And if I kind of take a step back and kind of just think about that in quantitative terms, right now, the average DashPass customer might be interacting with us a couple of times a week or something like that. But when I think about the number of eating occasions, there are 20% to 25%. And then when I add in the shopping occasions on top of food consumption, it exceeds 20% to 25%. So I think we're a fraction or a single-digit percentage of what DashPass could actually achieve.

So there's a lot of work to drive frequency, but that starts with adding more use cases to add more value.

Your next question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays.

Yes. I just wanted to have two. Can we get an update on the storefront software business and how SevenRooms and kind of the CRM part of it might be kind of accelerating the efforts on that side. And then back to the replatforming, you guys have done a nice job of laying out how all these components are coming together. Just a question is on timing. So clearly, this will benefit both like speed of new features being rolled out and potentially expanding products or geos. When we kind of see the benefits starting to show up? Is this going to be like a continuous thing in '26 onwards? Or is it more kind of like after this year? Just any thoughts on the timing?

Yes. I can start. So on first question with respect to storefront and software in general. It's going really well. I mean, like if you look at the integration of SevenRooms, that also has been a relatively newer project for us, about 6 months in partnership with the SevenRooms team. And already, we've been able to tremendously speed up their work. I mean, they're now adding venues 50% faster post acquisition than before we partnered with them. And if you think about like if we step back and think about the thesis, it's kind of proving the thesis that if you can add the best-in-class CRM software with the largest demand generator platform, which is DoorDash, it is a really valuable asset for these restauranteurs who really want to build more regular customers and have that direct relationship.

That is also true for the storefront products, which is less about in-room dining or in-store dining and much more about the takeaway product. But especially as we expand kind of the merchant cohort in which SevenRooms currently addresses -- SevenRooms is kind of serving the higher end kind of cohort of restaurants. But as we simplify the features to be able to address a larger segment, that's where storefront and SevenRooms really can team up to both serve a restaurant's 4-wall business as well as their business outside their premise. Your second question on the timing of the [indiscernible]. Look, I wish that the [indiscernible] were already here. But the truth is you'll see a majority of the [indiscernible] work completed this year. That's at least my expectation. And I think with respect to the benefits, you don't have to wait all at once. In fact, we're already seeing benefits from the work we're doing with the global tech stack in all of our different geographies in which we're shipping features from one market that are working into a different market.

So that's already happening. That's in fact, one way in which you can test whether or not the value of the [indiscernible] actually has any positive value to customers. And so we're seeing that. But yes, we expect the majority of the work to be done this year.

Your next question comes from the line of Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo.

Two, if I may, please. First, could you provide some color on what you see in the cohort data that gives you the confidence in continued robust core U.S. restaurant growth anything you might share on how later adopters behave differently than the base? And the second question, I just want to touch one more maybe on where Ross was going. As we look to '27, I know it's really early to speak about '27, and we appreciate the color on the '26 quarters. But any way -- any early take you could give us on the balance between investments and margins beyond. Any early thoughts on how you view incremental margins beyond '26 versus maybe historical?

Sure. Again, I'll take the first one to -- Look, I mean, when I look at the performance of the U.S. restaurant digital, like I said in the earlier question, I mean, '25 grew faster than '24 at a larger scale. I should tell you the health of the underlying cohorts. MAUs continue to be quite strong. In fact, we at an all-time high in terms of MAUs.

In order frequency continues to be quite strong. When I look at the engagement of new consumers that still join, I mean, that continues to be quite strong. And the other thing that you're seeing is, I mean, subscription continues to be a big driver of growth for us, both Q4 as well as '25, we added a record number of subscribers. What you're seeing in the business is as the product continues to get better, there's more people that habituate, they graduate towards subscription, subscription, they retain more, they order more as well as they try new categories.

So overall, when I look at the mature cohorts as well as the newer cohorts, the engagement level in the U.S. business continue to be strong, not just across restaurants, but even our new verticals business. And I think your second question, Ken was just sort of incremental margins. Look, I mean we're not guiding the business towards incremental margins. We're not operating the business to additional margin.

Our focus has always been on overall profit dollar production. But just to frame your thinking in terms of overall tech stack and what the impact there is. Look, there's a couple of costs in there. One is some redundancy in cost as we try to run both [indiscernible] in parallel. Majority of that spend will be in '26, some will be '27. But that will come off. And you should expect that to be a smaller component. But biggest value driver for us like we touched on earlier, is going to be velocity of feature development, you're going to become more efficient as developers work on the same tech stack across all 3 platforms. And you should see the impact of that from an underlying cohort perspective as well as overall growth in the business.

Your next question comes from the line of Bernie McTernan with Needham.

Just wanted to follow up on the discussion on AVs. Do you think the use case for delivery AVs will be broader than robotaxis and mobility, meaning that at least for the foreseeable future, robotaxis expected only to be in dense cities. Is there a use case for delivery AVs in the suburbs and then as we're asking follow-up questions on the financial guidance, in the press release talked about EBITDA a lot higher in the second half of the year. I would say that's probably typical to normal seasonal trends that we see within the business. Just any additional color you could provide would be helpful.

Yes. Bernie, it's Tony. I'll take the first question on AVs. I mean the short answer is absolutely. Yes, of course, we think that the delivery vehicles will be able to address both suburbs and city centers. In fact, if you look at actually do, it was constructed in a purposeful way to actually serve many of the suburbs. And that's true in its form factor, that's true and how we think about integrating it into the autonomous delivery platform in terms of which assignments they also received were just which should not receive -- that's also true for all of our projects for our drone projects, too, which cover, I would say, even beyond suburbs, but even more rural regions where the distance the distances travel are much farther and you can go a lot faster in the air sometimes then you can go on land.

Bernie on your second question, I mean, look, what I'll say is my expectation, like I said, for the full year has not changed compared to the last call, I expect the full year margin to be up slightly compared to 25%, excluding Rue and rod to be about $200 million. You're also right. Look, the shape of the curve for us for EBITDA has always been -- second half is higher than the first half. That's naturally how our business works. It's purely math, right? The volume grows through the year, unit economics grow. You put book those 2 together, you'll have more gross profit dollars as you go through the year, which means second half will be higher than first half.

We have delivered on that in '23, '24, '25, '26 is going to be no different. There are a couple of things which are different. One is investment in rule. Some of it is front loaded. Like I said, it impacts Q1. I would expect the EBITDA to increase as you go through the rest of the year. The second one that we are seeing in the business is when I look at the pace of expansion of profitability for both our new verticals and international business ex that will increase or the pace of expansion is higher than in previous years, especially as I expect new verticals to be gross profit positive in the second half and international [indiscernible] to be contribution positive in the second half. So you put all this together, that's what's giving rise to the shape of EBITDA curve where second half is going to be higher than the first half EBITDA.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with Citizens Bank.

Ravi, I wanted to stay on costs and the intensity of investments. If I look at R&D and G&A, it's 211 basis points of GOV. we've talked about kind of that 2% target historically. Should we expect GOV to kind of grow when we just grow into this higher fixed cost? Or how do we think about the fixed cost component of the business on a go-forward basis? And then going to grocery, is there any detail that you can provide us in terms of the graduation of customers into the Sunday Shop. Can you talk about just the evolution of customers and whether you're starting to capture larger baskets?

Yes, Andrew, I'll take the first one, right Look, when I look at OpEx in Q4, I think that's probably what you're asking about as well. There's inclusion of [indiscernible] So you should take that into consideration. When I look at 2026, I would expect OpEx to be roughly about 2% of GOV that we talked about. Look, we're being very disciplined. We're investing in areas where we're improving the product to ultimately drive both scale as well as profitability. You're seeing that in terms of the overall growth as well as the profit dollar production. Look, I mean, our goal is to continue to generate leverage right, like OpEx, I think over a cost of doing business, and our goal is to continue to generate leverage on it just like any other part of the P&L.

Andrew, on the second question with respect to grocery, yes, is the short answer. We are seeing the evolution of customer behavior both now incorporating kind of the middle of the week run, which kind of outdoor ash started 5 years ago in the grocery category to now the larger baskets that happen on the weekend. If you're in the U.S. and other parts of the world, it has a slightly different behavior, but we do see both behaviors now where people use us for both kind of the quick runs as well as the stock up use cases.

You see this, in fact, happening faster and faster with each successive cohort and you see each existing cohort actually increasing their spend and their overall share of wallet when it comes to grocery with us.

Your next question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley with Mizuho.

Was just wondering if beyond the first quarter guidance you can help us with just how to think about a framework for GOV growth for the balance of the year. I appreciate the comments on the EBITDA cadence, but anything you can help us out with on GOV growth?

Yes. Look, I mean, I think a couple of things, right? Like one, growth in the business continues to be quite strong. And we are seeing that from both existing consumers as well as new consumers where MA growth continues to be strong order frequency continues to be strong. Like I said in one of the earlier questions, I mean, DashPass had a record year as well as continues to drive overall growth. First, the way I think about it is as long as we are continuing to improve the product, the underlying cohorts are responding, as you can see from engagement as well as sort of retention and for us, I feel pretty good about the overall growth, not just in Q1 but for the rest of the year as well.

Your next question comes from the line of Lee Horowitz with Deutsche Bank.

Maybe building on an earlier one. 2026 is obviously a big year for investments in sort of the software and services back for your merchants. I guess looking beyond this year, where do you see sort of the natural adjacencies that you can build on top of once you've sort of rolled out this new software service stack for your merchants that will drive more value to both your merchants and the consumers in the coming years.

Lee, I can start. I mean, the short version of this is -- I mean '26 in many ways, is like a setup year of building like a new company that is now a global company operating in 40-plus geographies around the world. But doing the same thing. We just have like different countries and different markets to consider and there are also at different maturities that when we've ship certain products, right? So there's a lot of different things. And I think a lot of the adjacencies to your question can be derived from what we're shipping at DoorDash, right? I mean -- so if you think about the different missions we have.

One is we want to bring you everything inside the city. So a lot of the work is going beyond restaurants. I think we've certainly proven ourselves capable, at least in the categories of grocery, convenience and some of the early innings of other retail categories.

So we've got a lot of work there to do. A big part of that has to do with also building fulfillment services in which we can forward deploy inventory on behalf of retailers so that they can offer same-hour, same-day delivery and be competitive with other big companies. We also have to invest in autonomous technologies so that these companies can do it at the highest quality and the lowest cost. So that's one big mission in terms of how those adjacencies work. The second one is how do we actually build software such that these companies can be omnichannel businesses? We talked a little bit about this on this call where we talked about store front, SevenRooms. But there's also a DoorDash drive and offering delivery as a service. There's other services that we ought to be building as you think about how a physical business must effectively adopt in order to become an end-to-end digital business.

So we have a lot of merchant services work that we have to do. That's also connected to the third vision of actually driving in-store traffic to merchants, right? We're starting this with restaurants in the form of 2 products going out in which we're offering value to customers to discover new restaurants for casual dining. And we're also doing it in the form of access where we're offering reservations to some of the best restaurants that work with SevenRooms. And so I think the -- there's a ton of work there to do as well. So I think those are 3 big missions that will take us quite a long journey in terms of building the operating system for local commerce and connecting consumers and merchants in more ways than we currently do.

And if we can do this across every geography in the way that makes the most sense for that geography, I think it's a very exciting future for DoorDash.

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Patterson with KeyBanc.

On the ad side, it looks like you made some nice progress with [indiscernible] I'd love to hear more about how you're evolving the ad product this year and some of the key stats you're taking to capture more grocery and retail advertising dollars. And then separately, I know this is not related to replatforming, but we have seen a lot of companies see benefits from agentic coding. Curious how -- what type of efficiencies, if any, you're seeing from that and how that might fit with the broader replatform initiatives?

Yes. Justin, this is Tony. Yes, maybe I'll take both. On the question around Ads, our Ads business is growing really, really fast, and it's probably something I should have added in terms of just when I think about the record year that DoorDash had in 2025, Ads was a big part of it in terms of -- it's more of a derivative or an output in terms of the growth from our marketplace.

But it really had a strong year. With respect to Symbiosis, I mean, it's, again, kind of similar to some of the other acquisitions that we've made. It's off to a great start. We see that we've doubled the number of advertisers for symbiosis as well as triple the spend from those advertisers. And so I think that's been kind of the performance kind of speaks for itself. And in terms of kind of the road map this year, I think there's a couple of things.

One is just -- I think one of the things that there's a lot of obviously talk in the ecosystem about just agents and agentic commerce and things like this. But one of the biggest agents that actually we've shipped last year was really our Smart Campaigns product in which we are helping restaurants buy on their behalf always ROI positive ad campaigns effectively. And I think that has been one of our fastest-growing products on the restaurant front.

With respect to grocery and retail, Yes, we're definitely earlier to -- on that maturation. But I think that just means that there's a lot more opportunity and runway for us in that space because most of the focus on the ads business thus far has been on the restaurant side. With respect to kind of coding agents, I think, which is kind of the premise of your second question, this is a topic that is changing literally by the day, maybe by the week. It's been kind of astonishing and almost breathtaking how fast the coding is changing has changed, is changing and likely will continue to change given the piece and trajectory that we're on.

I mean we see 90-plus percent daily active usage, something like that across all of our engineers when it comes to these coding agents, which certainly has made them productive. The question now is like what is the right new environment for them to kind of keep up that sustained productivity gain -- and so that's, I think, the role that we and many others are trying to figure out.

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post with BofA.

In the release, you talked about unit economics of grocery retail going positive in the second half. What's enabling that? Is that scale? Or are you seeing new efficiencies on that front? And then thinking long term, how do you think about grocery retail bottom line profitability relative to U.S. restaurant?

Justin, I touched on this earlier look, I mean, overall, new verticals continues to be doing really well. The profitability side, we've made really good improvements on the unit economics. To me, there's nothing tech function or one big thing that we have to go solve is continued execution across improving logistics efficiency, improving the quality of the product.

We talked about the fact that we're seeing basket sizes being bigger, both for existing as well as mature cohorts. Just continued execution, trying to find pockets of efficiency up and down the P&L, improve the product, which will ultimately get us to being gross profit positive in the second half of the year. Look, longer term focus continues to be -- how do we get 30% of our mouth that order from categories, set of restaurants to be closer to 10% -- and if we're able to work on the product, if you make the quality of the product better, I think this is going to be a large business, which will produce strong free cash flow for us over a long period of time.

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI.

I was just going to ask 1 question on Deliveroo. You talked about how you accelerated the year-over-year growth in total orders for Deliveroo in the December quarter. That's faster than I would have expected. Was there -- just explain how you were able to do that? And just are there a lot of other things you see that make you think that you can continue to accelerate those orders?

Yes. Mark, it's Tony. Look, the short answer is we just shipped improvements to the product. And there was no like one thing. And what I've learned about a lot of these businesses is -- it sounds really easy to bring you a burrito on time every time in the condition that you'd expect. It's actually another much more difficult thing to do it in practice. And it's just shipping a new thing every time we see a problem.

And I think one of the great things was just how easy the partnership has been with the Deliveroo team. I mean I really commend our teams working together really well. And just again, shipping, executing to deliver against increasing customer expectations. We are not done. We have like a ton of work to do. Yes, we had a great kind of start, and I'm really proud of the team.

On the flip side, I also see like a ton of opportunity where we have to ship even more [indiscernible] And so -- so most of it was like just shipping things that we know are broken to also adding things that we've seen work in other parts of our business. We just see a lot more of those opportunities in front of us.

Thank you, everyone. This concludes today's Q&A due to the time, and this also concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.Goodbye.

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the final discussion we're going to have here at day 2 of the Morgan Stanley 2025 European TMT Conference, where we're very thrilled to have Ravi from DoorDash here to talk through everything going on in the industry. There's a lot going on with the company and the industry. So thank you so much for that.

Absolutely. I was in the elevator, there was like a couple of investors that were saying, oh, I'm going to go to the DoorDash thing. And they're saying, well, there's a lot going on over there. Yes, there's a lot going on. So let's talk about it.

There's a lot of things being delivered. And we are the last thing before the bar. We have to keep it under [indiscernible] just so you know.

There was DoorDash. You could have gotten DoorDash to deliver the drinks for you.

That's right. That's right.

You're not here yet.

But first, the exciting disclosures. Please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. They are also available at the registration desk.

Some of the statements made today by DASH may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and DASH undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to DASH's Form 10-K or 10-Q for a discussion of the risk factors that may affect actual results.

So there's a lot going on. Maybe I sort of want to go back, talk a little bit about the strength of the core U.S. business, sort of what you saw in 3Q and sort of what you're seeing now as you sort of enter the fourth quarter of the year. So let's talk about the core U.S. business. What are sort of evidence and signs of strength you have on the core U.S. restaurant business?

Sure. I mean, I think let's start with the U.S. business overall, and then I'll talk about the restaurants business. The summary is that the core business is doing really, really well. It's as strong as it's ever been. Look, the business is growing at a larger scale. If you look at the third quarter, the business is much larger than a year ago, and the growth rate has accelerated for the fourth straight quarter. When you look at the underlying areas that we operate in, the restaurants business accelerated, new vertical business accelerated, we've gained share in both of those businesses. And when I look at the operational metrics, we've had more number of monthly active users in the first 9 months, twice the number compared to -- we've added twice the number compared to 12 months of last year as well as order frequency is continuing to grow at the same time.

So you have a business where the growth is accelerating, the underlying operational metrics are really good. Ultimately for us, this is a cohorted business. So even when you look at the cohorts, older cohorts are engaging better, the newer cohorts are continuing to engage better with us. So the underlying strength and the fundamentals of the business continue to be very strong.

Most people ask me, is there something going on in Q3 that makes a difference. It's not like there's something that we did in Q3 that is driving the results. I would say if you look at the past several years, the performance of overall U.S. as well as the U.S. restaurant business has been pretty strong. It's largely because of the investments we made, it's largely because of how we operate the business, which is trying to find efficiency, then taking that continuing to reinvest back in the business because the way at least I think about it is, we're trying to drive durability of growth in a sustainable manner over a longer period of time. That's largely how we think about operating the business.

So when we generate a dollar of efficiency, look, I mean we have a couple of decisions to make. Based on where we think is the highest IRR, do we let that drop to the bottom line or do we invest back in the business. And our view and philosophy has been given where the product is and given where the market is, the best use of their dollar is to put it back because ultimately, that drives more profit dollars in the future. So if you think about like the way we are thinking about operating the business, which is drive the top line in a very sustainable, durable manner over a longer period of time, which leads to scale, that scale leads to more profit dollars, take that and reinvest back in existing or newer businesses. And you're seeing that strength come through in the way we've operated the business over the last decade.

One more on the core, the strength. So I know you've made a lot of changes and improvements to the app and the offerings in the app over the course of the last, let's call it, 1.5 years. Are there any areas that have particularly outperformed even what you thought it would do when you rolled it out that you can sort of say, wow, this is why we keep accelerating the business off of even larger basis.

Sure. I mean that's a great question, right? I mean I think there's not one thing, right? For us, it's always a combination of improving selection, improving quality, improving affordability on the platform. I mean the one thing that I think investors outside in often don't see is the impact of quality. We obviously talk a lot about quality, right? Like today, the orders are much faster than about a year ago. There's fewer missing items. There's fewer defect rates. The reason those things are important is because when a consumer gives us a chance, if the quality is better, they retain better.

This business is not about acquiring consumers, it's all about retaining consumers because the retention is the only thing that compounds over time. If you look at our U.S. business, we have a retention advantage compared to peers. When you look at our Wolt business, we have a retention advantage compared to peers. That's the reason we are growing faster than the market, and that's the reason why we're gaining share. All of that comes from the incessant focus on making everything about the product continuing to get better over time.

Okay. Let's talk about investment. That was probably the -- I'm sure you've been asked this question a few times in the last week. That was probably a big surprise. So let's start with sort of big picture. You talked about a few hundred million dollars of incremental investment in a few buckets. Maybe walk us through those 3 buckets, any way we should think about order of magnitude or sizing that few hundred spend?

Yes. I mean I think I'll clarify a couple of things, right? Look, I mean, I think when we talk about investments, it's nothing net new that we're trying to do. We've always operated the business the exact same way. When I look at 2020, 2021, 2022, we've always invested several hundred million more than the prior year. We've built the grocery business. We've built our new verticals business. We've built our international business. The reason the strength of those businesses exist today is because we've taken a discrete point of view that these are large markets. We have an opportunity to go build a better product. We've invested behind them. And that's the reason why you're seeing those businesses grow faster than peers as well as continue to gain share.

It's largely the same thing that we're doing. When we think about building the business, I'm not looking just at next quarter, right? What happens next quarter was already sort of done maybe 3 or 4 years ago because it's investments we made then that is producing the results now. We are sitting there thinking about how do we drive the same level of duration of growth as well as profitability in 2029 and 2030. That's the investment that we're making now. But the way and the philosophy in which we are operating the business has not really changed.

We have the strength of the core business doing well, which is what I talked about, right? Where, a, the growth continues to exceed our expectations, the profit dollars are increasing over time. And for us, the best use of those dollars is continue to reinvest back because that's the highest IRR. The reason we called it out is there's a couple of discrete things that we're doing. But it's not like we're sitting there and saying, hey, we have 2026 planning coming. That's why we want to increase more dollars or we're not sitting there and saying, hey, it's fun to invest, let's co-invest, right? The way we operate at DoorDash is everything starts with a very small amount of people. It starts with a very small amount of dollars.

Think about it as a one pizza team. We experiment a lot. We've put milestones in place. It's a very rigorous process before we say we're going to scale those investments. It's just coincidental that we're making a few different areas of investments. We've tested, we've experimented with these products. We have tested with these opportunities over the last several years, which got us to this point. And that's like sort of the broader picture.

Now going back to your question, Brian, on where we are investing, I would say think of it as 3 sort of like broad buckets. The first one is we are replatforming our underlying tech infrastructure, and I'll talk about that in a minute. The second one is software. The third one is autonomy. Of the three, the larger portion is obviously the work that we're doing around the tech platform. And there's a couple of things that I want to make it clear, right? We're doing that because we think it's the right thing to do, because we think it's the right thing to actually make the product better over a longer period of time.

I'll give you a simple example. In the U.S., we ran an experiment where somebody said, based on some unique insight that they had, they figured out a way to cut about 21 seconds of Dasher active time, which is the number of seconds that the Dasher is active on the platform. That leads to efficiency gains. That leads to a better consumer experience. But now if I have to replicate that same experience across Wolt as well as [ Rue ], I have to put 2 separate engineering teams to work on that.

I'll give you another example. I've been visiting the delivery team the last few days and I have been digging into the product. I've been spending more time with the team. DoubleDash, which investors in the U.S. use quite a bit, which is when you order something on restaurants or you order something on grocery, we just pop up a small thing on the screen saying, hey, do you want to order, add on a few extra items. That feature has driven a lot of awareness, especially to new verticals in the U.S. That's how we drive a lot of organic awareness to the U.S. -- in the U.S.

The feature exactly as it exists, doesn't exist on the [ Rue ] platform. So we're saying this is a good opportunity to drive awareness, to drive MAU penetration, but somebody has to go rebuild that. So when we partnered with Wolt, we looked at this and said, hey, there's an opportunity for us to become more efficient because you don't need 3 different engineering teams to build the same features. If you have the same sort of engineering team, same features available worldwide at the same day or same time, that drives feature velocity higher. And we've seen examples of this where the Wolt team is already using the underlying DoorDash tech platform for our ads engine. And we've seen the gains we've had because we've had years of development, which now the Wolt team is reusing it.

Then we took a step back and said, what if that were true for the entire platform, especially now that we've added [ Rue ] as well. That's like the investment that we're making in terms of the tech stack itself. And if you break that apart, there's 2 costs within that. One is, given that we're doing roughly about 8 million orders a day, we're being very careful and very disciplined about how we are working on migration of the tech stack. So there's going to be a period of time we're going to run both tech stacks in parallel because by the time we bring it up, we don't want to make sure there's any issues with the existing stack itself or servicing the orders that we have.

Some of those costs over time are going to go away because eventually there's going to be only one tech stack that we run. In addition, the second set of cost is the new platform natively comes with AI capabilities, which are going to speed up development, which are going to speed up the ML models that the teams have, which are going to speed up personalization, which is going to speed up the information that we have about consumers that is going to be native inbuilt in the platform. That is going to be efficiency that we drive.

You don't have that now.

I mean we have that, but every team is sort of building it on their own. The grocery team will build something on their own. Restaurants team will build something on their own. They're saying, hey guys, this is foundational elements, let's just have it in the foundation. Then the second part is we are making it more redundant proof, which is essentially we're going to run closer to the consumer. We're going to run in multiple data centers. So there's going to be some increase in cost because of that. But the advantage that you get once we actually replatform the entire thing is two things. One is efficiency on the engineering side, which we talked about. You don't need 3 different teams doing the exact same work. And the second one, which is the one that I'm excited about is just the velocity of feature development. Because ultimately, think about it right, this is an industry where retention is important. Retention relies on product improvements. And the faster you can roll out products, which ultimately drives the product experience better that drives retention that drives order frequency, which ultimately drives scale, which drives profit dollars. That's the thesis, right? That's the signal that we are seeing as well as why we think that's the right investment to make.

The second one is software. This is sort of relatively simple. We partnered with SevenRooms roughly about 6 months ago, we are investing behind that. We're investing in sales and marketing. We are investing in the product. We just launched a bunch of new features. We've added more merchants this year since we've acquired the company. We also have our own underlying digital ordering platform. We're also investing behind that.

And third one is autonomy, where we're trying to build an autonomous delivery platform. We obviously have our own version, which is called as Dot, which we unveiled roughly about a month ago, plus in addition, we are doing partnerships. And ultimately, we think there's going to be different modalities because we're trying to build the most efficient logistics engine possible.

So when we think about investments, the way we think about it is, a, we've tested them. We feel like they're ready where they can scale; plus, we think that there is going to be payback obviously at different time scales depending on which area of the investment. And we see signals which warrants this investment. And we're doing it from a position of strength because going back to Brian's question, the core business is doing really well. It's growing, it's increasing overall profit dollars. And we are looking at it saying, hey, how do we continue to grow as well as increase profit dollars over time. And that's the thesis we've had.

That's very helpful. There's a lot I want to dig into. Let me ask you one more on the tech stack platforming because there's a lot of examples of tech companies that have gone through tech stack platforming that go on for a decade, a couple of cases. So when you're thinking about IRR and you're thinking about faster revenue growth, faster profit dollar growth from the tech stack, is this one of these investments where you may not really see material signal until '28, '29? Or should we think of this as you've been doing this and you might see some signals even in '26, '27 start to come?

Yes, I'll answer it slightly differently, right? Like remember, the reason we're running both things in parallel is we're taking a very modular approach to this. And modules, what I mean by that is like save the payments module or the core Dasher engine, or the consumer module, right? Like if you think about our overall tech stack, there's different pieces that essentially are orchestrated together to deliver the ultimate consumer merchant and the product experience. So each one, the module is going to come online to the new tech stack at different times.

So as the different modules come alive, you're going to start to see some of that signal early on. It's not like everything moves all at once. Some of the first modules are going to move in '26. The way we thought about it is we've done a lot of the design and the foundational work already in 2025. We're starting to roll out features on top of that in 2026. And as some of these features, as some of these modules come alive, you're going to start to realize some of the engineering efficiency benefits, you're going to start to realize some of the feature development because things that are developed now you write once and it's available everywhere. That's largely the way we are thinking about sort of the progress on that.

Got it. Got it. Actually it's very impressive as you think about how you found that your current tech stack is not as efficient as it could or should be and yet the U.S. business is doing so well.

Absolutely.

Could even grow faster for longer. Okay. Well, let's check through the areas of investment. Let's talk about software. Maybe walk us through your and Tony and the team's sort of big picture view about how you think about point of sale? What are you trying to solve for? And what are some of the investments you have to make to sort of accomplish the goal?

Sure. I mean, for us, right, like DoorDash has always been built as a merchant services company. We are a merchant-first company. We're trying to solve -- we are trying to provide different solutions for merchants. Obviously, we have a marketplace offering. Remember, I mean, the mission of the company is to grow and empower local economies. And I think we've deliberately chosen the words grow as well as empower because the grow portion is like, hey, we want to drive same-store sales growth. Merchants come online. We provide them with a tablet or we're directly integrated with them, sales start happening, that grows overall merchant same-store sales growth. But the empower portion is also pretty important because we think of that as how do we enable merchants to essentially thrive in a digital economy, right? How do we enable merchants to run their businesses better. That's where all of the merchant services that we've thought about come into picture.

The first version of the merchant service was Drive, which is essentially we went to merchants and said, hey, they're going to take the concept of logistics off your platform because we are a logistics company. We're going to provide logistics. And Drive, as you know, has done really well. We obviously have the highest market share in that platform. Many of the top 100 merchants trust us with us powering the logistics for them. Then we said we're going to extend further. We built a digital ordering platform, which essentially will power merchants first-party channel.

Now today, if you're on McDonald's or Starbucks or some of these brands, they use portions of our technology on the digital ordering side. Number three, which we partnered with SevenRooms because we said, hey, the table management plus the CRM plus the marketing, that's also important. The way we've talked about it is there's 3 distinct components, right? The table management makes merchants more efficient in terms of how they turn tables, how they manage them. Whereas on the CRM side, that gives merchants a 360-degree view. Now let's say, Brian is on DoorDash, but at the same time, he goes to the restaurant inside the store.

Now you can connect that experience that Brian has both online as well as offline. And that's a very rich powerful experience for merchants because then you have a lot more knowledge, then you can market and you can provide a lot more ad spend towards that. So that's largely how we are thinking about how we can continue to make merchants more efficient. We can help them run their businesses better as a part of the software stack that we're trying to build.

Okay. And is DashMart more sort of part of that separate discussion? I think DashMart is the other part. So is that part of the step-up in investment? Where is DashMart in the whole?

Yes. So it's not a step-up in the investment, right? I mean if you think about DashMart, our thesis on grocery is -- the reason online grocery is still sort of underpenetrated is because there's quality gaps because merchants just don't know what's on their shelf, right? And our thesis in building DashMart was what if we said we could serve a reasonably large percentage of SKUs that consumers order very periodically, and we can solve that with high quality with great speed. That's the use case that we said we started out with.

But our second part of the thesis was eventually merchants will want to partner with us because we know exactly what's on the shelf. We do the pick and pack as well we know how to do the delivery or the logistics component. It just took us several years where merchants realize that, hey, this is an important piece of the element. That's where the DashMart fulfillment services comes where grocers and retailers can now come and partner with us where they can use our own infrastructure for us to be able to deliver a portion of their products or inventory that they have. But I wouldn't call it as a net new investment because remember, we already have the footprint that we need that we are comfortable with. We're just using our existing infrastructure to be able to. It's a concept of now us partnering with more merchants. That's why DashMart fulfillment services comes into the picture.

So now one of my favorite questions I was to ask you in our -- always very privileged and honored to sit down with you. The grocery agent, the last few years, I've always asked you how far away are we from a DASH agent on Saturday morning saying, good morning, Brian, here are your 20 things you order for your family for groceries. I found some dip that goes well with your favorite chips. Here's a coupon for a new almond milk. Do you want the 9:00 a.m. Monday morning delivery time and I will say yes. It seems like if you have a native AI platform and you have a growing DashMart 1P business, we could be closer. Is it a '26 possibility? Or am I missing sort of other things that are going to be...

I think like I'll answer it slightly differently, right? I think personalization, improving the consumer experience is a very high important priority for us. That's where everything that we're doing around AI, everything that we're doing around experimentation, everything that we're doing around building essentially a native AI platform is going to come into picture.

For us, the way we think about it is, ultimately, all of the agent work is largely around demand generation where I'm completely comfortable to meet where consumers want us, whatever the experience they want from a demand or an intent generation perspective. But the thing to remember is there is a physical component to our business as well. It's not just purely a commodity.

The reason we have the retention advantage that I talked about is because the quality on our platform is better. There's fewer missing items, there's fewer cancellations. There's fewer never delivered items. All this -- the combination of both the digital as well as the physical is what makes the experience on our platform better, whether it's restaurants as well as grocery, right? And our goal and focus is not just one or the other, I think we need to continue to improve both in order for the end customer experience to be better than what it is today.

How do you think about sort of the agentic world from a first-party agent or third-party platform agent. Obviously, you'd love to have your agent, your DASH agent that communicates with me. And then I think you struck a partnership with GPT, sort of some of their early agentic capabilities. So how are you sort of thinking through the risks and the opportunities of potentially a GPT or Gemini wedging itself between you and the consumer?

Sure. I mean I think for us, the way we think about it is, ultimately, it's another sort of traffic-generating channel for us. And today, I mean, we have multiple channels, right? People can go on Google and search for us and ultimately they end up on the DoorDash app largely because the experience itself is better, right? Like they express high intent and the experience itself is better. So we're comfortable with all different formats.

The key thing to remember, right, is it's not a commodity product at the end of the day. It's not a commodity product where there is no marginal cost for every incremental order, right? I think the difference is the experience, the quality that we provide, that is the differentiating factor and ultimately, why consumers will choose one platform or the other. The combination and focus has to be a combination of both, not just one where you're trying to aggregate the demand or generate the demand, but you also have to focus on the experience of delivery itself, which is where, honestly, we try to excel.

Your infrastructure around delivery, your inventory, your innovation is never more important.

Yes, absolutely, right. Plus the fact that we know exactly what to deliver at what point and we know where different seats are, what the mapping needs to be on how do we get to you faster on time. I think that's pretty critical in the end-to-end experience for a consumer.

Before we get to [ Rue ], where you've been hanging out the last few days, the other areas of spend you talked about was autonomous. I think you've actually been pretty active in autonomous announcements and headlines and sort of what's been going on and early experimentation in the last, let's call it, 6 months. So maybe walk us through sort of the autonomous vision and sort of the multiple prongs that you're throwing at this.

Sure. I mean I think a couple of things I'll say. We've been working on autonomy for several years now. Very similar to what I said around investments, right? We start very, very small. There's always a very small team with a very small amount of resources. And I think that honestly breeds creativity and innovation because there's constraints, which allowed us to figure out a form factor that we thought was pretty important from a delivery perspective. Because when you think about autonomy, right, like a car itself is never going to work because burrito is not going to walk into the car by itself. You needed a smaller form factor, which can get to the merchant door, which can get to the consumer door as close as possible.

We've been experimenting. We've been working on it for a while. But ultimately, the goal for us is to build an autonomous delivery platform. That's why our concept is we have our own sort of like first-party effort that we're doing, which is Dot, which we announced roughly about a month ago. We're still experimenting. We're experimenting. We're learning. We're going to start to deploy that in a couple of cities, just to experiment to learn more. But at the same time, we have third-party partnerships, whether it's Wing sort of on the drone side or Serve Robotics or Coco or other things.

We are comfortable with both sides because ultimately, our goal is to build the most efficient logistics engine, plus at the same time, to deliver the best consumer experience possible. The combination of both of those means we need different modalities for different type of deliveries, depending on whether a package type, weight as well as distance. So we think eventually the combination of, a, both land as well as air, both first party as well as third party is going to be the right ultimate solution, which is why we're trying to build more of an autonomous delivery platform.

Okay. That makes sense. Let's talk about [ Rue ]. You've been in the last couple of days, you had a little while now with the asset sort of in the house. Let me sort of first ask you with, as you know, having a little more time to see what goes on behind closed doors of the company. What has been the biggest surprise for you kind of spending a little more time with the asset now that you own it?

I mean I wouldn't call it a surprise, right? Like from a performance of the business, I spoke about this on the call as well. I think the top line is doing better than what we expected when we underwrote the deal. And from a bottom line perspective, I mean, I think we are comfortable with sort of the guidance that we've given because honestly, that's what we underwrote from a model perspective. But what's giving us more confidence is the strength in the top line has given us confidence to continue to invest.

I mean look, the thesis for us was large markets, attractive markets from a profit pool perspective, the business is unit economic positive where we can make a difference from improving the underlying product. And I think we thought that there was an opportunity for us to deploy our product playbook, our operational rigor as well as operational execution. I think the combination of that was very attractive to us.

Right now, when we think about it, right, there's a lot of opportunity in most of the markets that they operate in, whether it's improving selection, whether it's improving quality or making the product more affordable. Look, I mean we've already had the learnings from having operated with Wolt in Europe. That's an additional sort of like benefit that we have is not only do we have the product expertise in the U.S., but now we have product and improving the underlying overall delivery platform in Europe as well. And I think the combination of both of that, plus the fact that it's operating in really large markets, that's the attractive part for us.

Okay. The food delivery always is very competitive. You've had a lot of success in the U.S. Wolt has had a lot of success in some of its countries. But some of the countries, it seems Japan or Australia have been a little disappointing, at least it seems externally. So any learnings from those markets that have proven to be more challenging than perhaps you thought versus the markets you've had more success that you can sort of bring now to France or the U.K. as you sort of think about further growth for [ Rue ]?

Yes. I mean, I think it's like every country and every market, the local nuances are very different. For us, the view and the thesis has always been we have to work on getting the product to be better, shipping features faster. Again, it goes back to why we're trying to bring all 3 platforms together, make them more AI native, because ultimately, for us, product development, improving the underlying product, working on the input metrics, whether it's improving selection quality or affordability. Whenever we've done that, we've seen sort of direct correlation in improvements in retention order frequency. That's going to be the thesis that we're going to operate.

The second thing is, our philosophy on operating the business is not going to change, right? The goal is we always try to find improvements in unit economics, take that and try to find sustainable ways to drive growth by reinvesting back in the business. I think that is largely how we're going to think about operating [ Rue ]. The other thing is now we have a larger platform, which is whether it's our SevenRooms offering or other offerings, which we can offer in different markets. That's going to be an additional feature set that we offer merchants, which is going to drive merchant stickiness as well as drive revenue as well.

What about DashPass. I know it's sort of -- it's a broader topic and it's probably done particularly well in the U.S. Anything you'd call out as sort of levers that you have seen that are still effective in driving DashPass adoption even after all the years of that product?

Yes. I mean I think the biggest lever is making the underlying product better. So I think the way consumers think and the way we think about it is if you're making the underlying product better, they habituate more. Once they habituate, they try to graduate to DashPass because it just makes sense. And what you've seen from DashPass is it has higher retention, higher order frequency, there are earlier adopters of newer categories, whether it's grocery or convenience or retail.

So I think the core still remains if the underlying product is getting better? People come back, they retain more, they order more. And once they start ordering more, they're already habituated to the platform and we say, hey, it makes more sense for a consumer to be on DashPass. That is the largest graduation path that we've seen.

Okay. One of the questions that I commonly get asked, and actually, I know you did on one public call recently is sort of play macroeconomist about the restaurant demand landscape. There's a lot of mixed data points for some of the publicly-traded restaurant results have been underwhelming. And yet both your U.S. food delivery business and your competitors' U.S. food delivery business are doing incredibly well, accelerating, et cetera. Is there anything as you look at your platform that would sort of explain why that's happening? Is it mix shift toward moms and pops? Is it sort of changes? And what are you seeing that could explain that?

I think the key thing I would say is consumers love selection. I think rather than just like one-off, I mean, people want more content, more variety. I think platforms like ours that obviously is something that we provide, they want more choice, right? And second thing is we've tried to improve the product from an affordability perspective. If you're on DashPass, obviously, there's no delivery fee. And I think that helps. I think even some of the names that you're seeing, obviously, I've not studied all of them, but I think they are name specific, and I think it's not related to the overall industry. If you look at mid-market or if you look at the other brands, they're generally doing quite well. I think you're seeing that reflected in their results. But obviously, now when you are on a platform like ours, just given the choice that you have, given that the product is continuing to get better, that's obviously reflective of the growth that we've driven over the last several years.

And the DashPass point is to kind of go back to that really quickly. I think as part of Wolt, you'd rolled out some more subscription products and sort of...

Yes, we have Wolt+, which is doing really well, by the way.

Have you seen sort of a similar uptick or a similar reflex reaction to diners in those Wolt markets as you sort of run the DashPass playbook in the Wolt market?

The adoption has been faster, largely because the learnings from running DashPass for the last 5-plus years in the U.S. has helped us accelerate some of those learnings in the Wolt markets. So when I look at the adoption from an MAU perspective, that is faster on the Wolt side compared to where [ DashPass ] at the similar age, just given sort of the experience and the things that we've learned over the course of the last several years. But I think subscription makes sense because ultimately, we want consumers to retain more. We want consumers to order more. And once they switch to subscription, I mean you see that as a clear distinction compared to people who are not on subscription.

Got it. I'm going to open it up for a couple of questions. But I have one more I want to ask you just about is as you look at the U.S. business and really the U.S. restaurant business and really sort of dig into the KPIs that you can invest in that you're choosing to invest in. What are areas when you sort of look at the forward budgeting and you say, we could invest a lot more here and drive growth? Like where is sort of the greenfield to drive growth in the U.S. restaurant business?

Yes. I mean I think when you think about the sort of like the 3 vectors that we have, right, there's still a meaningful percentage of deliveries that have defects. For us, it's one of those things where you have to just look at the edges and figure out where things are going wrong and continue to work on those. Quality is one of those things where I don't think you can ever be perfect, and it's something that yields a lot of rich rewards. So as the quality continues to get better, people trust the platform more and that drives, again, their engagement on the platform.

On the restaurant side, I mean, one of the things is selection never gets stale because restaurants got a business, net new restaurants get created. So It's something that we need to continuously be on top of. That's something which is an ongoing effort. We have a lead compared to peers in terms of selection, and that will continue to sort of like drive gains and retention and something that we need to continue to work on.

At the same time, we talked about affordability, right? It's a thing that we constantly think about. We continue to work on affordability by investing back into the business, right? So when you think about the core underlying portions of the business, there's hundreds of things that we continue to work on. Each of them, we're trying to improve by basis points every single quarter. That compounder over a long period of time is what you're seeing in terms of the results that you see in the restaurant business. But look, I mean, when you think about whether it's on the user side, I mean, it's still small portion of even the overall number of people that exist. And as well as when I look at the multi-active users versus people that are at least once a year, there's a gap. And we think about it and saying, hey, why is that the case? And it always comes back to we have to continue to make the product better.

When I think about order frequency, I mean, it's mid-single digits a month compared to people eat 3 times a day or 80 to 100 times a month. It's still a lot of opportunity for us to continue to improve both the user growth as well as the order frequency growth.

Perfect. And one question for Ravi.

[indiscernible]. Maybe you can talk any impact on you guys and maybe tied into SevenRooms [indiscernible]

Yes. I mean, sure. I mean we -- like I said earlier to what Brian was talking about, I mean, we think of ourselves as providing merchant services. Obviously, we work with other POS players as well as we're developing our own software services because the goal for us is to ultimately essentially ensure that merchants can do a better job of running their own business. And when you think about SevenRooms, I mean the business is growing quite well. We've added a number of merchants. We're investing in making the product better.

We just launched reservations marketplace on that just about a month ago that we announced. So overall, when you think about the feature set as well as some of the improvements that we're making, you're seeing merchants really respond well to that development that we are doing.

Time for one more. Let me ask you one on the DashPass is so fascinating to me in the cohorts. I remember a couple of years ago, we were talking about how the DashPass members age well, spend more in year 2 than 1, 3 than 2, 4 than 3, et cetera. Has that changed at all? And so are you still seeing like these DashPass members even as you're adding more, are they still aging where that is really a bigger and bigger driver of the flywheel in the GMV?

Yes, I'd say a couple of things, right? One is DashPass had a record quarter as well as a record year. So we added more DashPass members in the first 9 months than we expected for the full year. Not only sign-ups, but also the retention is getting better as we make the underlying product overall better. And what we see in DashPass is a couple of things, right? Once consumers become subscribers, their order frequency is higher, the retention is higher. And when you look at it on a cohorted basis, even the older DashPass cohorts, their engagement with the platform is increasing, which is reflective again of the product getting better.

So you have a combination of two things, right, where the number of members is increasing as well as older cohorts are also continuing to engage more. So both of those are ultimately driving the growth that you're seeing in the business. And we still think that there's a lot more opportunity for us to have non-DashPass members graduate and become DashPass members.

Perfect. All right. Ravi, thank you so much for the time.

Thank you so much having me.

Thank you, everybody. That was great.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Desiray, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the DoorDash Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Weston Twigg. You may begin.

All right. Thanks, Desiray. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our Q3 2025 earnings call. I'm pleased to be joined today by Co-Founder, Chair and CEO, Tony Xu; and CFO, Ravi Inukonda.

We'll be making forward-looking statements during today's call, including without limitation, our expectations for our business, financial position, operating performance and profitability, our guidance, strategies, capital allocation and investment approach, our plans and expectations regarding the integration and benefits from our acquisitions, our expectations regarding new product and service initiatives, including our autonomous delivery platform as well as expectations regarding platform safety, our global technology platform and the broader economic environment. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Many of these uncertainties are described in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Qs. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events or performance. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures may be found in our earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.doordash.com. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results and are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Finally, this call is being audio webcasted on our Investor Relations website. An audio replay of the call will be available on our website shortly after the call ends.

Operator, I'll pass it back to you, and we can take our first question.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Deepak Mathivanan with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Two-part question on the several hundred millions of incremental investments for 2026. First, how much of this is towards tech platform initiatives versus perhaps more direct product and expansion efforts that tend to have a very defined near-term payback?

And then the second part is can you expand on the tech platform efforts. Are you sort of essentially rewriting the tech for AI development? Or is it more about integrating AI tools with additional token expenses into the service? And in addition to sort of opportunity for accelerating the product development, do you also see any potential for cost savings from these efforts over time?

Deepak, it's Tony. Yes, I can maybe start on both questions, and Ravi, feel free to add. Yes, look, on the first question of where are we spending, we're primarily investing in 3 areas and kind of the second part of your question kind of feeds into the first part.

So the first major area is building a new global tech platform. And so this is an effort that's been underway for a couple of years now, but it's coming to a head where we're actually making the majority of those investments in 2026. And what is its purpose? Well, there are several reasons of what we're trying to accomplish.

The first thing, what we're trying to accomplish, is we're trying to build a single global tech stack, where when we launched one experiment, the experiments that actually make it to our customers can be shipped at the same time across all of our markets and all of our audiences. Today, that doesn't work that way as we have 3 companies at DoorDash on the restaurant delivery, our marketplace front with Deliveroo, Wolt and DoorDash. In the new world, we'll actually be able to have 1 feature go live to all audiences; whereas today, that 1 feature would get to have -- would pretty much have to get shipped 3 times, which is very inefficient in how we do that.

Another goal of the tech platform is to, like you said, in your setup, to make it AI native. And so there will be lots of tooling there where -- I may have mentioned this in the previous call before, where if we were starting a company over again today, I think we would write software pretty differently from how we used to do it. And so there's a lot of work in order to architect how we set up the architecture, so we can manage both agent workflows as well as how you would deploy software, test software, write software, what the role of the engineer is in that new paradigm. All of that is getting constructed as part of this work.

Yes, and I do actually think that, at the tail end of this work, you'll see, on a go-forward basis, not only will we ship faster and ship improvements across the board globally. We'll actually be more efficient, and we'll have freed up engineering capacity to do a lot more work. And so that will allow us to not only have a better cost structure but really just be able to do a better job in solving the next problem for customers.

So the first area of spend is in building our tech platform. The second area is investing in new products. And so we announced probably, well, several launches in our dashboard product events, which happened at the end of September. And we're really excited about them. A lot of times, when you're building a company, what you're really doing is you're starting with lots of experiments. Some of those experiments make it into products. Some of those products then can be graduated into commercialization where you're trying to test whether or not you have a good business. And then some of those candidates then ultimately yield big businesses that generate the cash flows to allow you to invest in the next set of products and experiments.

And I think we're really fortunate at DoorDash in a couple of ways. One, in the area of local commerce, there's just a lot of different problems. And one is -- and the other way in which we're lucky is that a lot of the experiments, many of these have been running for years, are now coming ready for more investments. And so we're very excited to be investing behind them.

We announced, for example, a lot of work on in-store and building several products there with going out, reservations and our CRM platform behind SevenRooms. We talked about DoorDash Dot, which is the customized, purpose-built for delivery autonomous vehicle, the first in the world to drive on the road, sidewalk and bike lanes in order to make that happen. We talked about DashMart Fulfillment Services, where we're creating an ability for any retailer to offer same hour or same-day delivery with near-perfect accuracy.

So these are some examples of the new products that we're talking about. But if you think about it in each case, we're running the business exactly as we always have, where the goal is we want to make sure that we always can solve the most number of problems for our customers in the highest quality ways, and we manage our projects carefully to milestones. And as they deliver upon each milestone, we grow them into businesses, and we continue to invest behind them. I think our track record in investing in the areas that we currently have operating, whether it's U.S. restaurants, U.S. new verticals, the international business, our commerce platform, our ads business, have suggested that we've had some success in repeating this playbook, and we're doing this now for future growth.

Yes, Deepak, I mean just to add to what Tony talked about, right, look, our core business is continuing to do really well. I mean you're seeing that come through in terms of the numbers where, if you're thinking about it from a growth perspective, growth accelerated for the fourth straight quarter. Overall unit economics are improving across the business as well as the profit dollars continue to increase. This is giving us the ability to reinvest back in the business.

If you think about our operating philosophy, when the GOV is coming in ahead of expectations, when the unit economics are improving, our philosophy has always been to reinvest back in the business. If you're looking at the results today, it's a combination of these decisions that we've taken over the course of the last decade. That philosophy and how we are operating is not changing.

Look, we're very disciplined in terms of how we operate. We're thinking in terms of IRR. All of the investments that we talked about, we think they're going to extend the duration of growth as well as drive strong IRRs for us. And if you're thinking about '26, what I would say is that the EBITDA margin for the existing business, including the investments, think of that as the overall business excluding Deliveroo, I would expect those margins to be up slightly compared to 2025.

Hopefully, that should give you a sense of how we're thinking about investing. I mean net-net, look, the business is growing. The business is growing exceedingly -- exceeding our expectations. And our goal is to continue to reinvest, and we are very excited about the investments that we're making.

Our next question comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

Could I at least try 2? First one is also on investment. Could you please talk about where you're planning to invest as it relates to Deliveroo, what your goals are for the first year in terms of order of business and then -- and strategic focus areas?

And then the second one is on automation. Could you please talk about where you are in terms of expanding your robots and your third-party partnerships? And how do you think about scaling it and deploying the opportunities over the next year or maybe 1 to 3 years?

Yes, Shweta, I'll start and Ravi, feel free to add. First question is about investing in Deliveroo. This is kind of similar to what I said about our general investing philosophy and kind of what Ravi said about why we feel like now is the right time to continue to invest for the long run, which is whenever we see -- it starts with making sure that we can build the best-in-class product experience measured in terms of the retention, the frequency of use and the engagement from the audiences.

We think that we found a business actually in better shape than we had expected with Deliveroo, and we think that there's actually a lot of opportunity to add to the foundation that they already have and make continued product improvements so that it will achieve the best-in-class metrics along those dimensions. I think if we can do that and at the same time, improve the unit economics, I think that that's what will allow us to generate the greatest service for our audiences and also the greatest long-term business and returns for all of our shareholders.

And so the first order of business really is making sure that we continue to invest in the product, make those improvements. And then, of course, over time, you'll see cost efficiencies come out of the business because we'll be combining 2 European teams on the same continent. But I think the first order of business continues to be adding to the strong foundation that the product has and making sure that we can make it best in class given the learnings that we've had with Wolt and DoorDash and then grow from there.

On the second question around autonomy, the way that we're thinking about this is really pragmatic. And I think the most important thing is understanding that the vision for autonomy is really going to be a multimodal world where you're going to see different fulfillment methods. Some of those fulfillment methods will happen with Dashers. Some of them will happen with vehicles on land. Some of them will happen with vehicles in the air. Some of them will happen with vehicles built by DoorDash. Some of them will be filled by vehicles built in partnerships.

And really, what's important is DoorDash has the luxury to create our own autonomous delivery platform where, depending on whatever the use case is or whatever the customer need is, we can solve it with the highest quality, the lowest cost and the best service, and that's really the goal. And so we'll be fairly pragmatic on how we do this. So a lot of it, we'll be testing within one market, getting that right, figuring out the go-to-market motion because there's many parts you kind of have to get right, everything from the manufacturing when it comes to making these products in-house to partnerships, to integrating the hardware and the software, to making sure you get the repair and the teleoperations correct, to making sure that you work well with city governments.

There's a lot of things you kind of have to get right, and so for us, '26 will be the year where we're ready to commercialize some of these efforts. But I think this is going to take a while. This is not something that's going to happen overnight. It does require making investments upfront because sometimes these decisions are required upfront, and you don't really get the product until later. But for us, we're pretty excited about what we see as the potential. We also are very, very excited about this autonomous delivery platform, where we're going to be able to inject whatever the right fulfillment method is in order to give the best service.

And Shweta, your point around Deliveroo, look, I mean, we're very excited with the partnership with Deliveroo. Look, I'll wind us back to the deal thesis that we have, right? This gives us the ability for us to operate in really large attractive markets where we could deploy our operational playbook, our product playbook to drive operational rigor.

If you think about it, the focus for us is -- what we're learning is there's an opportunity for us to continue to improve product. There's an opportunity for us to improve the consumer experience. To your point around the focus, that's what we are focused on. Why is that important is because it drives scale by improving retention and order frequency, which will drive more gross profit dollars. That's honestly how we operate DoorDash. That's honestly how we operate Wolt. Deliveroo is going to be no different for us.

What we see in the business is, from an EBITDA perspective, look, we are very comfortable with the profit generation of the business. It is in line with what we underwrote when we did the deal, which assumes some level of investment. Now what you're seeing in the business is the growth is exceeding our expectations. The business is growing double digits, which is giving us confidence to invest back in the business. The focus for us continues to be investing behind the team, investing behind product, which will ultimately drive your long-term free cash flow generation in that business.

Next question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays.

Glad to be back on the call. I guess just following up on just the broader consolidation that we've seen from you guys and from Prosus acquiring JET, how do you see the overall landscape in Europe evolving next year on the back of all of this?

And Ravi, it sounds like you're investing in Deliveroo to grow a little bit faster. I assume that the $200 million of EBITDA is reflecting that investment and the platform consolidation investment that Tony just talked about a few questions ago would be kind of a separate thing, not included in reducing Deliveroo's run rate from what it was before to this $200 million based on some kind of like allocation of that platform investment. Just any clarity on that, that minutia would be helpful.

Look, on the first question on the European landscape, I think we have a great opportunity to be the leading local commerce platform there. And I think a lot of the confidence of what inspired us to pursue the Deliveroo acquisition really came a couple of years ago after gaining confidence in working with Wolt.

The first test for us was whether or not we can actually take some of the lessons that we've learned at DoorDash and also combine them with the lessons that Wolt has learned in building their markets, to see if we can create the best-in-class product. And I think when you look at our growth rates, which continue to exceed those of our peers as well as just the retention and frequency levels and how they're progressing nicely as well as the unit economics improving at the same instance to all-time highs, we gained further confidence that we could kind of take on the next project.

And that really is kind of how Deliveroo came into the puzzle. So when you add up our presence in Europe, you're talking about presence in over 20 countries and with the strongest position in the cities with the biggest profit pools, and so I think there's a lot of strong foundation to build from. And so in general, what I see is can we solve the most local commerce products in Europe the way that we're trying to do that in the States and in other countries. And so far, as I mentioned, we've been fortunate where some of the experiments that we've been running for a while now are now coming into fruition into becoming real products, and we're starting to invest behind those products, which is some of the investment commentary that we outlined in the letter. And that will translate over to Europe as well.

Ross, to the second point, yes, I mean, the $200 million, think of that as the contribution from Deliveroo to the overall EBITDA. And think of that as the investments that I talked about earlier, right? It's investments that we're making behind product. It is investments in selection, quality as well as people. You should think of that as the contribution of Deliveroo EBITDA.

Next question comes from the line of Josh Beck with Raymond James.

I wanted to kind of go back to the tech platform that you've been building in the background. I'm curious kind of what you've learned thus far and kind of why this moment in time was the right moment to inflect upwards. There's a lot of external changes in the AI stack. The international scale of the business is obviously very different. Robotics is having breakthrough. So I'm just kind of curious if there was maybe a smaller list of items that drove the step up.

And then with respect to the integration, I think in some cases, they can be messy. You have obviously a lot of consumer-merchant-Dasher ecosystem. How do you minimize the disruption and kind of keep the strength? It sounds like the Roo business maybe is kind of in the double-digit range, so it seems to be in a pretty good spot. How do you maintain that throughout the integration?

Yes. I can take that. I guess with respect to the tech platform, I think this was something that always was in our heads when we're thinking about the acquisition of some of the companies that we're talking about, right? I mean, like, by and large, these companies perform the same service in each of the geographies.

Now there are a lot of, obviously, local differences, but by and large, the service themselves are the same. And I think that's one of the things that screams that we should be building a single-type platform to actually make sure that all of the products are under the same data models, the same architecture, the same UX. But when you're doing that, especially when you have like a change as big as AI happening externally, you obviously have to take that into consideration.

So I think some of these things kind of came together in the '24 time period, where it was exceedingly obvious like what the right thing to do is, and then now you just have to go and do it. And that's kind of the work that we've started here in '25. It will really take shape in '26, which is, again, a large part of the investments. Obviously, those investments will come off, but like -- but that's -- the timing of that really makes sense for us.

On the integration of Roo, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean we obviously -- one of the reasons why we're incurring extra cost is because we are making extra tech investments to make sure that Roo can continue to perform well on its own even as we're building the single tech stack. And so as a result, when you have these added investments, that's what explains it, and -- but that's also how you protect the experience and the service that the Roo customers get to see even as you're building this new foundation.

Next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

Just one and a follow-up. How should we think about advertising broadly? I mean it obviously comes in at a high incremental margin. There's flow-through versus reinvestment. So just how are you thinking about how we should think about how that flows through?

And then second, there's been some questions, a report floating around about kind of documented workers and the government kind of cracking down undocumented workers and certain reports like talked about what percentage. Just any color you can have about how you manage making sure that you don't have undocumented workers on the platform and how you manage through that? And any exposure there?

Sure. I can take both of those questions, Jason, and feel free to add in here, Ravi. Look, on ads, I mean, we're pretty excited about the ads business, right? I mean it's -- it was the fastest business, ads business in history to get to $1 billion of annualized revenues. And it's also a business where we have extra budgets wanting to spend more on the Dash platform than we kind of give ad space to.

And that's because, when I think about the ads business, I think the reminder I always give to our teams and I would say again here, is that you kind of have to solve for all of your audiences.

On the one hand, you obviously have to maximize the return on ad spend for advertisers. On the other hand, you have to make sure that you are not degrading the consumer experience. And that's hard to do. There are real conflicts and real tensions and real trade-offs and negative consequences, I think, if you get that incorrect, and that's why I've always believed the right order to sequence things is to first build a very healthy marketplace, and then the monetization opportunities including ads will follow.

And they have. I mean, look at our business. I mean we've continued to grow faster at bigger scale for many quarters in a row now, and you're seeing the bottom line contribution margins and EBITDA margins grow in the same instance. And so I think all of that is suggesting that, I think, we have the right trade-off, and we just have to make sure that we have the discipline to maintain it.

On the second question, I mean, Dasher supply has never been healthier. It's always been something that's obviously very top of mind for us, which is making sure that we get correct all of the Dasher authenticity pieces. There's a lot of work that goes into it. We -- something that we've been investing into for many years now and will continue to. We've seen no challenges to our Dasher funnel or supply irrespective of whatever reports there might be out there, and it continues to be something that we've upheld the highest standards and something where it's -- we've always done it the right way, I guess.

And Jason, just on your point on the ad business, right, just to clarify, I mean, I think the ads business is growing. It's growing quite nicely. We don't differentiate that from, okay, are we thinking about it just purely from a flow-through perspective because, for us, every dollar that we generate, our goal is to reinvest back in the business at healthy rates. That applies for improvements in unit economics or applies for dollars that we generate from ads. We think of efficiencies that we could generate so that we can put that back in the business. But net-net, ads business is growing, and it's growing quite nicely.

Next question comes from the line of Michael Morton with MoffettNathanson.

I guess maybe one for Ravi to start. If I'm just doing like quick math here, looking at your guide and kind of what it means for the core business, it seems like this incremental step-up cost could maybe be like $100 million a quarter. You feel free to correct me on that.

And then if -- Tony highlighted the buckets where the spending is going, and sorry, it's a stupid question, but from the outside looking in, just understanding maybe like where the platform development spend, like how that hockey sticks so much if it's something that's been going on for several years.

And then what I found interesting was the DashMart Fulfillment Services comment he made. And I was just looking for any more details if you're really stepping on the gas there and if this is like maybe part of a partnership with some of like the, I'd just say, large AI platforms, where maybe you work local commerce more into these e-commerce searches. And is there more cost involved as you build out DashLink? Anything there would be really helpful.

Yes, Mike, I'll take the first one. I think to your point around -- I mean, look, we are still early in terms of how we're thinking about planning. We'll give more precision as we give quarterly guidance. What I would say is if you're thinking about 2026, to the earlier point, what I made to Deepak, is I would think of margin for the existing business, including the investment areas, think of that as the existing business plus investment, excluding Deliveroo. I would expect the margins to be up slightly compared to 2025. Hopefully, that should give you a sense of how we're thinking about margins as well as investment into '26.

Yes, Mike, I guess what I'd add to some of your other questions is, first, the reason why the tech investments go up in '26 is because that's when they're actually happening, right? Like the way -- if you think about how would you build new software, the first thing you would do is you first have to architect it, right? And so you're not actually really doing much actual coding. But like, for instance -- but once you're ready to code, what do you have to do? Well, okay, well, one thing you have to do is you have to spin up some cloud instances. And if you're going to maintain multiple stacks as you're building a new one, you're going to incur extra kind of temporary cloud instances, right? And so that's one of the reasons why the costs go up. And that's -- so it's just basically like when you're actually ready to deploy the software and actually get everything onto the same tech stack, that's what's adding to the kind of temporal costs.

With respect to DashMart Fulfillment Services, it's less about working with AI companies, although -- and more on how we work with our existing retail partnerships, right? So what is Dasher Fulfillment Services? Well, the goal is we want to -- one of the challenges in delivering from just third-party stores is that not every store and most stores actually, I would argue, do not know their inventory, and this is for a whole host of reasons. And even though we believe we have leading accuracy and the quality of delivery when it comes to any category, including those outside of the restaurant category, it's still not good enough because it's not perfect, right? And therefore, why would a customer pay a premium to get not what they ordered or to get a substitute of what they ordered?

But if we could manage the inventory systems ourselves and actually run the fulfillment setup end to end from the warehousing to the inventory to the fulfillment, we get almost near-perfect accuracy. Okay. So how do you translate that and do it for every retailer, especially retailers who may not have the density of stores or the coverage in the country so that they can offer something like same-hour or same-day delivery? Well, I think what I would argue is you can literally turn every physical retailer into a omni-channel player.

Now that's going to take time, and this is one where it takes time to set up supply chains with retailers, to test the right markets, so on and so forth. But what we're very excited about is that the quality is best in class. Now what we're doing is we're adding selection that's never been made available to customers before and bringing it close to where they are so that these retailers can offer same-day delivery, and that combination is now happening.

Next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with Citizens.

I wanted to ask about new verticals. You guys talked about the fact that unit economics are still negative. Can you talk to us about the path and maybe the visibility that you have to breakeven? What are the key kind of operational things do you guys need to do to get there?

And then in terms of just U.S. kind of growth overall, now gross adds were higher year-to-date versus 2024. Can you guys just talk about the opportunity of where you guys are finding new users? I know we've talked about this on past calls. But can you just revisit what pockets you guys unlock in there?

Yes, Andrew, let me start. Look, I mean, talk about the overall performance of the new vertical business, right? Like look, new verticals had a really strong quarter. The business is growing really fast. We're the fastest growing. We believe we are leaders in terms of order volume share ahead of our expectations.

Remember, if you recall, Q4 of last year, we talked about the fact that 1/4 of our users order from new verticals. That number has continued to grow quite nicely. Miles have increased. Order frequency is increasing. The overall basket size continues to increase, which just tells us that consumers like the product. The usage of the product then continue to go up.

On the unit economics front, just to be clear, I mean, unit economics continue to improve. They've improved sequentially Q-on-Q as well as year-on-year. We're very comfortable where the unit economics are. We are comfortable on what it needs to get to, to be breakeven. Look, a lot of that is going to come from scale as well as continued improvements, whether it's quality of the product that we continue to improve.

What we're focused on right now is scaling the business. We think there is an opportunity for us to continue to improve the product. As long as we continue to improve the product, this is going to be a large business for us, which will drive more free cash flow generation in the future.

Yes. And then your second question with respect to the U.S. strength, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean we're thrilled with the performance of the U.S. marketplace. I mean 4 quarters in a row of increasing strength on a bigger base, especially at the scale that we're talking about certainly is something that we're very proud of.

There's no one thing. I mean a lot of the performance that you're seeing today really were the result of actions probably initiated 3 years ago, where it's this continued maniacal focus on improving the inputs of the experience. How do we improve the selection, the quality, the affordability, the service levels?

And when you do that -- and that's because the most difficult thing that we always compete against are increasing consumer expectation. You talked in your question about why are we seeing increasing monthly active user penetrations or perhaps why are we ahead of schedule on some of these forecasts. It's because we're delighting each cohort of customers, right? And each new cohort of customers obviously have a higher expectation bar than the previous cohorts.

And if you can keep delighting the new customer cohorts where we are still the leader in acquiring new customers, whether it's in the restaurant category, in the grocery category, in any retail category, well, then you're also delighting all of your existing customers. And so you kind of have this bow that lifts all of your cohorts, and that's because of product improvements. And -- but a lot of the stuff started probably 3 years ago, and now we're making investments into things that we -- hopefully will have an impact 3 years from today.

And Andrew, when you look at the underlying cohorts, right, the demand on the underlying cohorts continues to be very strong. Both MAUs are growing. Order frequency is growing. Even subscription, both in the U.S. as well as international, had a record quarter in terms of DashPass subscribers as well as Wolt+ subscribers.

What we see in the business is even existing cohorts, cohorts that are quite old, they're also continuing to engage with us even more. All of this goes back to, look, I mean, improvements in product, improvement in selection as well as quality that we've been continuing to work on not just in the last quarter, right, over the last several years.

Next question comes from the line of Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein.

I had a clarification on the investment commentary. Is the bulk of the spend fixed cost investment that you get leverage on as you compound the top line? Or is it a step-up in variable costs as well? And then on new verticals beyond grocery and convenience, which categories of the retail or local commerce opportunity, do you feel, are showing the most promise from a demand perspective that becomes the next big category for DoorDash going forward?

Yes, Nikhil, I'll take the first one. On the spend and the investment areas, look -- I mean, our goal is we are spending up and down the P&L. Some of that is going to come through in terms of cost of sales. Some of that is going to sit within sales and marketing as well as some of that is going to sit within R&D and OpEx.

Look, the areas that we're investing behind are we're trying to increase and scale our autonomous program, obviously, doing it in a very disciplined manner. We're growing our software business. Both our digital ordering as well as our SevenRooms business falls under that. They're starting to generate revenue. That's going to continue to increase. And finally, some of the tech stack work that we are doing, which you talked about, that's going to hit across the P&L. So you should think of that as, a, some of that is going to drive leverage as we go through as we scale the business.

Nikhil, on your second question with respect to which categories are we seeing growth, we're actually seeing growth quite a lot across a lot of categories outside of -- multiple categories outside of grocery, convenience and alcohol. And it tends to be somewhat probably what you may expect that comes with time of the year.

For example, pets is a category that's kind of a all-season category. As we head towards the holidays here in the U.S., you see categories like electronics really spike in terms of the gifting use case. We've seen growth in health and beauty. Home improvement has been a very big surprise to us, seeing growth where we're delivering, believe it or not, thousands of pounds of mulch per day. I guess, that more happen maybe in the summer time period. Again, so some of this has to do with when customers need different things.

But I think what's really interesting, even without just looking at the performance of these categories, is just actually looking at where things are going, like the trend and the trajectory and the input metrics such as the searches for different types of products. And we're effectively becoming the everything inside your city store, and as a result, we're seeing growth across the board.

And so sometimes, some of these new customers are coming in -- we talked a little bit earlier about MAU growth or monthly active user growth. They're coming in for the first time outside of the restaurant category. And then what you see happening is they'll then shop in the restaurants and then back and forth. And this is what we've always believed could be the case, where if you start with the highest frequency category of restaurant food, which is where we are the leader, you just get the most shots on goal.

And then now we're also the leader in terms of transactions outside of restaurants, both in grocery, convenience as well as the categories outside of that. Then you really get this multishopping behavior across the board. And if you can do that the most number of times, which I believe is what we're on track to do, you'll create the most valuable membership program, which is DashPass.

Next question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley with Mizuho.

I wanted to go back to the DashMart Fulfillment Services and just better understand the plan there in terms of integrating all this 3P inventory, especially on the grocery side. Is this going to require like a lot of build-out of new facilities? Or do you just sort of take control, pick and pack inside some of the partner facilities?

And then as we think about the time line of that, and it seems like this could be a really big and attractive area of investment, is that something -- is this something where '26 is sort of continuing to experiment on this and maybe you scale it more in '27? Just like anything more you can help us understand like how that will work and the time line around that would be great.

Yes. Lloyd, yes, on DashMart Fulfillment Services, we're obviously super excited, and we share your optimism that this could be a very attractive area of investment. I think the short version of this, it really depends on the retailer we work with, right? Some retailers have different goals. For example, some retailers may want to launch new geographies. Some other retailers may want to densify existing geographies. Other retailers may want to find attractive uses for less productive existing square footage inside their existing stores.

I mean there's a whole host of different goals, and this is why the question is a little bit hard to answer. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And so as a result, I think what's most important is you have to build different capabilities and be flexible. What we're stubborn on is we're stubborn on building the best possible experience where you bring in selection. That's never been made available to customers before, right?

If you think about it, there's -- roughly speaking, in cities, there's like tens of millions of items out there, and today, only a single-digit percentage of them are being delivered through DoorDash. And if you compare that to -- but DoorDash almost already carries the most amount of inventory for same-hour delivery.

I just think there's a massive headway and runway in front of us in terms of how much more of that inventory we can bring and fulfill on behalf of customers and bring everything inside the city. Now this though is not our inventory, right? This is the key challenge. It's a retailer's inventory and the challenge is, well, one, like does the inventory exist. And that's one of the reasons why we're building DashMart Fulfillment Centers -- Services because sometimes the inventory can exist and it happens to be inside stores, but other times, it doesn't exist or it's missing or it's in delay somewhere in the first mile or the middle mile.

And so it's complicated. But the simple thing that we want to give customers is we want to give them selection that's never been made available before to them, done same day or same hour. We're bringing a new e-commerce capability to a lot of physical retailers as a result on the retail side.

But the answer to your question is a little tricky because each retailer may have their own goals, and so there may not be one answer that, that is the setup. And that's why we have a handful of these retailers that we're working with, and we're customizing the solution that makes the most sense for them. And of course, we're making sure that's the best-in-class experience for consumers.

Next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali with Truist Securities.

Tony, one subcategory we did talk about is perishables. I wanted to just pick your brain on how you think the entry of Amazon in that space is likely to kind of impact you guys. Not even sure how big perishables is to you. I'm assuming it's small again, but maybe you can help clarify that. And just how are you guys kind of positioned to kind of defend your turf?

And then maybe just comment on the change in the guards at least in some cities like New York after the win of the Democrats last night, Mamdani, and how that potentially could impact Dashers pay, eventually Dashers organizing and just really not just in New York City but in other big cities as well?

Yes, I'll take those. Look, on the first question, look, I guess 2 sentences have always been true for the history of DoorDash, which is, one, it's always been a competitive space no matter which space we're talking about; and number two, DoorDash just continue to grow and I guess now even grow faster at bigger scale. And so I guess, like you may wonder how is that possible. How can you square away some of these things? Well, I would say a few things. I would say the first thing is the market is still very not penetrated, right?

If you look at something like grocery penetration, it is so low relative to something like restaurant delivery. And the reason, again, has to do with this inventory fulfillment challenge that I've talked about probably for several years now. Actually, when we launched DashMart in 2021, this was the original vision for DashMart Fulfillment Services, which I'm glad that we're now making come alive. But it's can we get you exactly what you ordered, and if you can't get customers exactly what they ordered, guess what, they're not going to order. And that's really the challenge, I think, when it comes to the grocery delivery space or the perishable delivery space.

With respect to retailers and folks coming in, well, I think at the end of the day, it's really about consumer choice, right? I mean consumers -- DoorDash was created so that we want to give and create a world where consumers can choose from any retailer of their desire. And we believe that maximal choice versus just choosing from 1 or 2 retailers is something that is not only both good for all audiences, but it's great for cities.

I mean that's the whole point of why DoorDash exists, to connect every local business to every local consumer. And if we can do that, we're going to grow the GDP of those cities and create more jobs for everybody and make better neighborhoods and all the good stuff that you'd want to see inside the city that you live in.

I guess that leads me to the second question, which is around what's happening with some of the different cities and kind of recent elections and stuff. My position on this has always been that governments and businesses should always work together. And that's what produces the best possible outcomes for all constituents. And I think this, again, is where several sentences can be true at the same time, even though they sometimes come into tension, I believe that all audiences deserve to be treated fairly.

For example, one of the hot topics in a lot of these coastal cities today, including the city where I live, San Francisco, is affordability. DoorDash has -- is probably the most aggressive on making sure that we are the most affordable platform. This is something that we've been doing since our history, and most recently, we're -- we took the lead, for example, on making sure the SNAP benefits could continue for those who needed them the most.

When it comes to Dasher pay and Dasher protection, that's something -- we were the first platform in 2019 in this country, in the U.S. to offer occupational accident insurance to Dashers without their asking us to. And it's something that we've always believed in. And I think that what I found to be most productive is finding commonsensical solutions and helping politicians create commonsensical policies so that they actually get what they want.

I think what sometimes unfortunately gets in the way is when ideologies or biases come without even evaluating the facts or what audiences want. And I think that so long as we put what audiences want up there, I think that businesses and governments can coexist. I believe that businesses should be allowed to be for-profit companies, and I believe that audiences deserved to be served.

Next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America.

I don't think you've really had a chance to outline synergies with Deliveroo on the -- maybe on the order and the top line side revenues, but I would love for you to talk about that if you can. And then maybe talk a little bit about the take rate differences in the accounting. That would be helpful.

Sure, Justin, I'll take both of those. Look, I mean, the focus for us -- like I said on the earlier question about Deliveroo, right, the focus for us is always, on day 1, is to continue to improve the product. It's to continue to improve the consumer experience. Why is that important is because that drives scale and the combination of scale and improvement in unit economics drives more gross profit dollars, right?

For us, the philosophy is to improve the product, to improve the overall gross profit dollars. That's what we are focused on from a day 1 perspective. Look, I mean, obviously, part of the deal thesis was to have cost synergies. We operate a global platform. We think there's going to be synergies largely from scale as well as cost redundancy. Some of that is going to take some time. We are excited about, a, the partnership as well as what we're seeing in the business.

To your second point around some of the accounting differences, the way I would think about it is, from an EBITDA perspective, you should assume roughly an USD 8 million to USD 10 million impact or an expense to EBITDA as you're thinking about modeling going from Roo definition of EBITDA to the DoorDash definition of EBITDA.

Next question comes from the line of Lee Horowitz with Deutsche Bank.

I guess going back to investments. I guess, how should we be thinking about the payback period? I mean a lot of talk about taking time, past dependency and spinning up an environment. So it sounds like payback periods are perhaps getting extended relative to your typical investment plans. Is there anything in this new bucket of investments that is perhaps more of the traditional quicker payback periods that is part of your typical playbook?

And then maybe relatedly, retail obviously sounds like a big and compelling greenfield opportunity for you guys. Any way to contextualize how much of this new investment plan may be specifically targeted at this vertical and driving faster growth outcomes there?

Yes. I can take both, Lee, and feel free, Ravi to add in here. On the payback period, nothing has changed. Our bar for payback period is still the same, and that's true whether we're taking on something in a completely new domain like DashMart Fulfillment Services or autonomy or our tech stack, for example. It's just that we're taking on more projects now, right?

And like I said, it's very hard to kind of forecast the progression of which experiments you ran many years ago to now which experiments have actually now earned their privilege of getting more investment. And so it's just more projects have found product market fit in our portfolio that I believe will achieve our investment philosophy, which is to maximize long-term free cash flow per share. So the payback period and kind of the methodology in which how we think about capital allocation has not changed.

On retail, I think it's probably similar to maybe a previous question about it. We are seeing a lot of growth in retail right now, and I think it's kind of similar to where -- but from a product perspective, I think we, DoorDash, are kind of in retail today where we, DoorDash, were in grocery maybe in 2021 or something like that or the tail end of 2020.

So we're just very early on the actual product experience itself, and that's why it's super encouraging. It actually means that the real reason why we think there's a massive opportunity in retail is because consumers are actually pulling us in. You see this not just in the buying behavior, which is great. But you also see this in the search behavior. You see this in what we talk about with retailers as well.

A lot of what DoorDash does is kind of 2 sided, right? We have a consumer business, which maybe most people know us for, but we also have a commerce platform, which -- and already, we've created 2 of the most successful B2B products out there with DoorDash Drive and DoorDash Storefront. Obviously, we're adding SevenRooms to the mix, which is really in the restaurant category. But in the retail category, we get a lot of requests to help there because I think these retailers recognize that we have a large audience, a large consumer base that we can certainly bring, but we also have capabilities that we can bring, right?

And DashMart Fulfillment Services is now part of the capability offering. Online ordering and fulfillment with Drive always have been there. But -- so as you kind of think about this, DoorDash is a 2-sided player in the retail realm where, obviously, there's the consumer front, but there's also the B2B front with retailers.

Yes, Lee, on the payback period, right, like, look, nothing is really changing about how we operate the business, right? Look, when we think about investments in payback, I think of it in terms of 2 dimensions. One is, is it ultimately improving retention order frequency. The other one is, is it driving free cash flow and IRR. So that framework and how we operate, that discipline is not changing.

Let me give you an example, right? We start with small levels of investment. As we find product market fit, we continue to increase the level of investment. Look at our new verticals business where we've increased our unit economics year-over-year. Look at our overall international business. That's close to being contribution profit breakeven. That just goes to show you the discipline of us being operators in how we operate the business.

As you think about the investment areas, look, I mean, the software side, the payback period is going to be shorter, but our goal is to continue to invest because that's going to drive revenue. Whereas if you think about our tech stack, all of that is going to increase our tech feature development velocity, which ultimately is going to help us release features faster, which is going to drive retention and unit economics, right? That's the distinction we have as we think about our investment areas, but the core philosophy and discipline in how we are operating the business, that is not changing.

Next question comes from the line of Justin Patterson with KeyBanc.

This is Miles Jakubiak on for Justin. I'd like to start with one on grocery. Just curious if you're seeing -- you had some nice grocer adds during the quarter. Curious if you're seeing any increase from grocers to move a bit faster on the delivery side and coming to the platform.

And then one just on going out or dine-in, in-person dining. Saw you had the Going Out launch and some SevenRooms stuff launched during the quarter, so curious if you could just expand on how you view that dining out experience fitting within the DoorDash ecosystem and the opportunity there.

Sure. Miles, it's Tony. I'll start, and feel free to add in here, Ravi. Look, on the first question with grocery, you're right, I mean, we're super excited about all the selection that we're adding, including Kroger, who we announced in the recent quarter. I think the short version of this is we've never been in a better position in grocery. And we're also adding across the board, not just the top grocers in terms of kind of the national scale players but also the local grocers and really across the board. I think every grocer is recognizing that DoorDash is now the leader in order volume in this category and the leader in acquiring new customers. And so this is something that I think people understand. And as a result, it's become more habitual that way.

I also think it's interesting that some of these grocers, kind of similar to the comment I made earlier about retail, are starting to ask us to help with other things. And so I think there's an interesting -- there's always this kind of 2-sided opportunity for us really on the -- certainly on the consumer front but also B2B.

With respect to Going Out, you're right. Going Out has been an experiment that we've been running for a while, and we kind of shipped more recently in some select markets. And it's going really well. I mean I think this kind of goes to maybe some commentary. I forget whether it was 4 earnings calls ago or 5 where we talked about there's more than 1 way to connect every local business and every local consumer. Today, I know we're known predominantly as bring everything to you, whether you're at home, you're in the office or wherever you are, but there's no reason why we can't bring you to everything. And again, the goal of the company is to connect every local business with every local consumer.

On the consumer front, we obviously have the largest audience with the most number of kind of frequency not just in terms of buying but also just in opening the app and the searches and everything else that they take action on in the product. But we also have quite a lot of information with merchants because of our B2B commerce platform.

A lot of these merchants are increasingly asking us to help them from not just online ordering, we have hundreds of thousands of those businesses, but analytics and marketing solutions. And I think with the addition of a product like SevenRooms, we can really democratize this ability that I think a lot of tech companies have and give it to every small, medium and large restaurant to be able to understand all of their guests and really allow the restaurants to maximize whatever might be the best thing to maximize for them at that moment in time.

Sometimes, it's going to be driving new customers. Other times, it's going to be driving adoption of a new product. And that's really what the point of Going Out is. It's really to introduce customers to restaurants that they maybe never tried before or add an occasion to build increasing loyalty to an existing restaurant that they do have a relationship with. Today, DoorDash effectively has a lot order frequency on bringing things to you, and we have almost no order frequency on having you go to a store, but we believe that can change.

And our last question comes from the line of Ron Josey with Citi.

That's great. Going back to Roo really quick. Understood the investments needed here and the acquisition literally closed, what, around 4 weeks ago. But would love to hear what you all think or learned thus far on ways to improve the product and the consumer experience as we think about these investments.

And then I believe it was mentioned in the letter or the press release that unit economics were flat quarter-to-quarter for U.S. restaurants. I'm just wondering if that's a change in trajectory or anything to call out there.

Yes, I can start, Ron, on Roo. Maybe, Ravi, if you want to take the unit economics question. On Roo, I think there's a lot that we can do, and I think that's mostly because DoorDash has ran just a lot of experiments at this point, tens of thousands of experiments.

And as you can probably guess, the vast majority of those experiments fail and never make it to you as a customer, but we have taken a lot of these lessons that have done well and brought them over to Wolt, for example. And we think that there's a lot of experiments that Wolt has ran, too, that can be portable to Roo in addition to those that would come from DoorDash.

And so there's no like one thing. I think that like I probably bore you with the list of features that, that would be talking about, but this really is the same answer to the question of how is it possible that the DoorDash marketplace can -- the U.S. marketplace, that it can continue to grow faster at higher volumes and increase our penetration with users. And it's because there is no one thing. There's thousands of small things that add up in terms of how we deliver on the selection, the quality, the affordability and the service. And so it will be a collection of things that we've already identified, and we're excited to ship them.

Ron, on the second point around U.S. restaurants, I mean, look, the business is doing well. We talked about the fact that the business is growing. Unit economics are still progressing quite nicely. Quarter-to-quarter, there's moving parts. But overall, I mean, really excited about what you're seeing from a unit economic perspective.

I think a few years ago, we talked about the fact that the incremental margins over the last 8 quarter average was above 7%. That still continues to be the case. I mean this business is growing at larger scale, accelerating as well as the unit economics continue to progress quite nicely. So we're really pleased with how the restaurant business is doing in the U.S.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the question-and-answer session. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.