DoorDash Aktie

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.

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the DoorDash Q2 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Wes Twigg. Please go ahead, Wes.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our Q2 '25 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. 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 this 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 Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

Let me try 2, please. On the U.S. marketplace, orders accelerating year-over-year, you continue to see strength in restaurants. So it sounds like the strength was driven by DashPass membership growth, frequency uptick and potentially some product improvements around personalization and maybe faster delivery. So I guess my question is, could you perhaps point to some specific examples around what you did on personalization and what specifically drove strength in membership growth and frequency?

And then the second question is on advertising revenue. You've now exceeded $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate, and you got there fairly quickly. So post Symbiosis acquisition, could you please share your thoughts on how you're thinking about scaling the on-platform and off-site ads opportunity as you see it in the near to midterm?

Shweta, it's Tony. I'll start, and Ravi, feel free to chime in. On the first question about the accelerated growth at bigger scale. Look, a lot of these improvements and developments were the results of our team's work probably dating back a couple of years ago. I've always believed that it's very, very difficult to make changes, especially at our scale that can have material impact within a short time period, whether it's the quarter or even the year. And in many ways, that goes to the work that we do today, which is the work that our teams are working on right now likely will have an impact on a quarter a few years into the future.

And I think if we're doing our work right, that is always going to be the cadence here at DoorDash, where the North Star focus is always to make improvements, first and foremost, to our products, to the selection that we offer of both stores and items to the affordability of those items and stores, the quality of delivery, the timeliness, the accuracy and certainly the customer service, especially when we get things wrong. And I think that's been a consistent narrative that reflects a consistent execution at the company for the 12 years that we've been doing this, and it remains to be the case today. So we've seen improvements across the board in our various products that have achieved the results that you're seeing today.

With respect to the second question on ads, you're right. At some point last year, we did cross $1 billion of revenue run rate in the ads business, making it the fastest in history to get there. And I mentioned all along that the ads business has been progressing really healthily. But the focus for the ads business today and 3 years ago when we started the business and in the future will always remain the same, which is we have to achieve the best consumer experience and build the most successful marketplace, which is what will enable us to build the most successful return on ad spend product or the most successful advertising business for retailers, CPGs and restaurants. And that remains the focus.

With respect to Symbiosis, an acquisition that we closed, one of the developments we've always had is that we've always been privileged where there is more dollars that advertisers want to spend with us than we are willing to give in terms of the surfaces in which we allow them to advertise. Again, we're trying to make sure that we have a best-in-class consumer experience. And therefore, whether it's compared to peers or just compared to what we think the right thing to do is we don't allow advertisements to just show up in the product. And so -- that doesn't mean though that there isn't a good use of dollars or proceeds from these advertisers. This is why we purchased Symbiosis, where together with our know-how as well as our information that we collect, we believe that we can be the best marketer.

You can almost think of it as we're the agent of choice where we can do the best marketing spend for each 1 of these merchants and advertisers. And a lot of times, I think when you think about our relationship with everyone we work with, we are not just a delivery provider. Many times, we are the growth engine or the growth button, both in terms of what we can bring incrementally from our marketplace as well as the know-how that we bring from our first-party business, in teaching these retailers and advertisers on how to build the most successful digital powerhouses in their own rights. And so you see that again here in the Symbiosis example as part of our advertising business.

Shweta. It's Ravi. I think 1 of the things that you mentioned was the acceleration of the ad business. I mean I would clarify, right? I would not read into the disclosure as us changing the way in which we are operating the ads business. We're operating the business with the same level of discipline. The 2 metrics are merchant ROAs as well as consumer conversion. We think we are best in class for both of those.

The goal for us has always been to build a great marketplace business. And if we do that, the ad business will scale and will continue to grow. But we are growing with the same level of discipline as we've done before.

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

Great. Tony, I wanted to ask an AI question. We're seeing big improvements in search and recommendation systems across a lot of consumer Internet platforms, basically using AI models with reasoning capabilities. You obviously have a very strong engineering team that's on top of these tech breakthroughs. Can you talk about some of the ways how Dash is planning to use these larger AI models to both improve user experience and also find additional pockets of operational efficiencies, maybe say in the next 6 to 12 months?

And then the second question, maybe for Ravi. With all the supply growth and value prop improvements that you've done with new verticals, how meaningfully is new verticals now contributing to a kind of new customer growth to the platform? And also maybe talk a little bit about the cross-platform benefits for the U.S. restaurant business from new customers acquired through grocery and perhaps convenience.

Sure. Deepak. On the first question on AI, I'll start. Whenever you see a revolutionary technology that seems to be improving by the hour, you kind of have to rethink your entire business. And I think this is a thought that dawned on me probably 4 years ago, when you started seeing kind of the beginnings of what these things can do. Because I think that in many ways, it's not just a new technology. It's also a new way of how you attack different problems.

So there are a few areas in which we found a lot of fruit in terms of how we thought about applying it. So the first is thinking about what should the what should the consumer product actually look like in a world where, to your point, there's a different way of doing everything from search to personalization to ranking. And I would say that there's a lot of different iterations that I think you'll see us take in terms of shipping a version of the product that will really, I think, marry the best of what the technology brings in a way that actually brings pragmatic benefits to different use cases to the consumer.

The second area is a lot of our business happens in the physical world. It's not just the deliveries, whether it's the creation of inventory lists or menus from restaurants or all the work that we do to onboard different merchants and retailers and advertisers, there's a lot of physical activity or repetitive activity that happens. All of those processes can be and are being rethought right now at DoorDash in terms of how we can do that in much more efficient ways with higher quality and fidelity.

And the final way is -- and we see this most notably in our engineering teams is really how do we become a more productive organization if we were to start this company from scratch in 2025 versus getting our start back in 2013. We see this a lot in coding certainly, we're obviously probably not a surprise when you're talking about large language models, when you're talking about domains where there are correct answers and easy ways to produce evaluation that can tell you whether you're on the right track or wrong track, coding has been a natural use of productivity for DoorDash now for a few years in a row, and I think that's only going to increase.

And so that should also be true though, in other functions. If you're starting -- if I were building DoorDash from scratch today, we would have a very different approach given all of the tools available. But this is kind of like when Door ash started 12 years ago where you had the real acceleration of cloud computing services where DoorDash no longer needed to manage data centers, we can kind of get easy access to AWS instances and kind of get up and running. This is kind of true today, but just at the functional level instead of just the compute level where across every discipline inside the company, I think you can from first principles re-derive how you would build the company from scratch, and that's what we're thinking about.

Deepak, it's Ravi. I'll talk about new verticals, right? I know you're question was around us. But let me take a step back and give you how we're thinking about overall new verticals and the performance of the business. I mean, look, new verticals had a really strong quarter. We're growing really fast, growing much faster than our core restaurant business. In fact, we grew share. And I think, like we said last time, our expectation is that we'll be volume share leaders within the next year.

If you actually break that apart, we are seeing strength both from new as well as existing cohorts. On the new cohorts, today, the size of new cohorts ordering from new verticals is higher than same time last year. The engagement levels of mature cohorts, think of them as existing cohorts, the size of those cohorts is also larger than what we saw last year. At the same time, these cohorts are engaging with us more, which means order frequency has continued to increase.

So when you look at the underlying cohort performance, it's very strong. Both users are growing, order frequency is growing, we went at all-time highs across both of those metrics. The other question is what's actually driving that growth, right? If you look at the performance of the business, we've increased the selection on the platform quite considerably. The quality of the product is continuing to get better. We've made the product more affordable, more DashPass users are ordering from more categories. Look, in Q4, we talked about the fact that roughly about 1/4 of our users order from new verticals. That number has continued to increase.

All of these are signs pointing to cohort getting value, consumers getting value from the product. And for us, the focus continues to be to improve the underlying value proposition. And as long as we continue to do that, we are confident that it's going to be a large business for us over time.

And your next question comes from the line Ron Josey with Citi.

Great. I wanted to ask a little bit more of the letter or the press release talks quite a bit about cohort trends, particularly within DashPass, members as you still continue to have records. So talk to us a little bit more about how DashPass cohorts have been trending here maybe on the newer cohorts in the last year or 2 as being similar results. And then as we think about sort of just the maybe bigger picture, and I know we're still yet to close the [indiscernible]. Any updated thoughts on the integration there? .

Yes, Ron, I think the first one on DashPass and Tony, feel free to chime in. Look, I mean, DashPass did a very, very solid quarter. Look, I mean, we've been investing in DashPass for years, right? Ultimately, the thing that is driving growth for DashPass for us is the underlying product continuing to get better. We're focused on adding more selection. We are focused on driving higher quality. We're making the product continue to be more affordable, there's more features and services available as a part of DashPass. Ultimately, all of this is driving the user journey.

What we see is we're acquiring more new consumers than ever before, those consumers are joining the platform. They are [indiscernible] more. They continue to graduate to DashPass and DashPass when they continue to graduate the order frequency is higher.

One of the things that you're seeing from a cohorts perspective around in DashPass, even the older cohorts, cohorts even as old as 5, 6 years ago, those cohorts continue to engage with us at higher levels. All of this is pointing to the underlying strength that we are seeing in the business.

I mean, look, it's not anything that we've done over the last couple of quarters, right? We've been investing in the product for several years now. The underlying product is getting better. That's what's driving the strength, both in DashPass as well as the underlying cohorts.

And Ron, it's Tony. I think your second question is about Deliveroo. Probably, obviously, there's not much I can say about it besides the fact that we anticipate closing on the time line we had communicated, which is at some point in Q4, it's obviously still subject to regulatory review.

But look, with any acquisition, I mean, we're going to run the company should it close in the way that we run anything at DoorDash, which is, first and foremost, we have to build and invest in the best product experience. And if we can do that and improve the order rates as well as improve the unit [ comics, ] where we see efficiency gaps, those are the tools in which we can use to reinvest back into each 1 of the audiences. Again, our investment philosophy has always been 1 of maximizing long-term margin dollars, not short-term unit margins. And that will continue to be the focus that we take to the Deliveroo project, should it close, and any other project at DoorDash.

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

Tony, are you surprised by the ongoing strength in the size of new customer cohorts in the U.S.? I mean it would seem like your audience in the U.S. is pretty large already in the high tens of millions of people which is a big number relative to U.S. households, but that doesn't seem to be affecting the funnel for new customer acquisition at all.

So when you step back and take a multiyear view, I mean, how durable do you think this trend is? And are you able to also break down how much growth this business gets from new customers versus pre-existing cohorts in a given year?

Yes. Nikhil. No, I'm not surprised is the short answer. And I think I may have said this in a few different calls before, whether when we're discussing this during COVID, peak inflation in '21, the normalization of COVID or COVID reopenings in '22, where food is the most resilient category and most sought-after category for convenient consumptions. If you just think about the fact that it is the activity in which we engage with 3 times a day, 20 to 25 times a week and more than 100 times a month. And then now you include all of the shopping categories and use cases outside of food that DoorDash has been pursuing for the last 5 years, I think you get the setup for some of the markets and the market expansion that you've seen.

But look, I mean a lot of the credit also goes to the fact that we're always trying to make our products better, right? So our product today in '25 is better than our product yesterday in '24, and our product next year will be better than our product this year. So you have this big market out there where we're a single-digit percentage of that when you look at the number of occasions that we actually capture today, we still lose the vast majority of those occasions to the pantry or a different form of consumption. And so it tells me that we actually have a very large runway ahead as long as we can keep improving the product.

And I think 1 of the things that tends to get underestimated is how much you can actually keep improving the product. And my take on this is that there's a lot of room. I said this before about our products into other categories, but even our product in the restaurant category, I believe, while it's best-in-class, I think in the eyes of the consumer, it still has a lot of gaps in terms of where we can improve.

And that's what we're working on every single day. And that's why perhaps they don't necessarily yield material benefits in the current quarter or even the next quarter. But I do know that if we keep working on this, the compounding does have that effect in the years to come.

And so -- sure, perhaps, we've been fortunate to serve lots of customers today, but when I look at the actual occasions that we capture today, whether it's food consumption, retail consumption. And then when I look at this on a global basis and then when I also include shopping inside stores, not just ordering to the home or to the office, I think we still are very, very, very small and early, and we can't underestimate just how much work we still have left to do to satisfy increasing customer expectations.

Nikhil, this is Ravi. Look, I mean I think the second part of your question was around like, hey, what's driving the growth? Look, everything is important, right? Size of new cohorts is important, size of existing cohorts is important. Obviously, mathematically, the size of the existing cohorts is larger than new cohorts.

What we're seeing is the size of new cohorts is larger today than last year. Size of existing cohorts today is larger than last year, which points to do things, right? One is people are coming back more often, which means retention is increasing. All of that is being driven by the underlying improvements that we're making in the product. The second dimension you should think about is order frequency. Again, order frequency hit an all-time high. But again, we're a small fraction of the total number of usable movements just across restaurants. If you add other categories, there's still a lot of opportunity for us to grow.

So just thinking about it from a model perspective, Nikhil, I would say growth is being driven by both users as well as order frequency. On the user side, both new as well as existing are higher than before.

And Ravi, if I could just follow up with a separate question. The net revenue margin expanded as promised. How are you thinking about that for the back half of the year?

[indiscernible] as promised, Nikhil. I mean, look, I mean, we talked about the fact that take rate was going to be higher in Q2. It was in line with our expectations. I mean, look, our business, there's factors that drive the take rates, specifically in Q2, Dasher cost is seasonal for us, right? Again, I'll reiterate, we've talked about this before. Dasher costs are higher for us in Q1, Dasher costs are higher Q4. So you're thinking about the model like in Q4, Dasher costs are going to be higher. They are more reasonable in Q2 and Q3.

So as we came into Q2, we saw benefit from Dasher costs. Two, we are driving improvements in the underlying product especially quality, which gave us benefit in terms of credits and refunds. The third factor was ads, that is becoming a larger portion. So if you put all that together, that's what drove the increase in take rate Q2.

Now if you're thinking about the rest of the year, right, Nikhil, I would think that H2, the second half take rate is going to be higher than the first half take rate. But just taking a step back. I mean, look, we are not optimizing the business towards a specific take rate, let alone a specific take rate within a specific quarter. Our goal has been to focus on overall profit dollars. Our goal is to invest flexibly up and down the P&L that's actually what's driving the strength that you're seeing in the business, right? We have the ability, we have the opportunity. When we see opportunities to invest, we double down. That's what's driving strength both in the top line as well as the bottom line.

And your next question comes from the line of Michael Martin with MoffettNathanson.

I think this is probably for Ravi. I wanted to ask some of the operating expenses, you typically refer to them as fixed operating expenses that are running maybe a little bit hotter than some of us might have expected, not that you should manage the business to our expectations. But we're living in a very interesting time where you hear a lot of the tech leaders talk about no head count growth, utilizing AI within their corporate structure.

So I was curious to how you think we should think about your needs for head count growth going forward? And then maybe it just could be helpful with kind of the fixed cost line item in the model.

Yes. Mike, I'll give you the model partners and then talk about the philosophy. Look, just trying to model, I would say OpEx, roughly, you should think about it as 2% of GOV, in that range, which we've talked about for the past couple of quarters. Over long term, like look, I mean, we think of that as any other part of the P&L, goal is to drive leverage, goal is to drive efficiency.

The topic here how I think about it, like Mike, look, we are investing in the business. We're still finding great pockets to continue to drive investment in the business. We're being very disciplined, we've added people, both on the product and the engineering side in specific areas where the return on investment continues to be great.

When you look at the output, I mean, the output is showing up in terms of retention, output is showing up in terms of order frequency, the output is showing up in terms of improvement in unit economics side. For us, all of that is being driven by the underlying improvements we are making in the product, we still think there's a lot of opportunity for us to continue to invest. But look, I mean, longer term goal is to drive leverage on this. We are driving a lot of automation inside the business across the board. In general, the way I think about this is the real cost of operating the business and goal is to generate leverage just like any other part of the P&L.

The only thing I'd add to what Ravi said is you got to think of DoorDash as a growing set of businesses, right? So DoorDash 5 years ago was largely 1 product and operating in 1 country, restaurant delivery inside the United States in terms of what contributed to our financial results. Today, we have 5 businesses. We have a business outside of the U.S. We have a business outside of U.S. restaurant delivery in all of our category expansion. We have a business with our Commerce Platform. We have an ads business, and we're working on new businesses.

And so I think 1 of the ways in which we've thought about this is where do we actually deploy our best people? And are they actually working on the right problems? And do we have the right number of people doing that. And a lot of our [indiscernible] growth is really geared towards working on new problems that we see that we can solve for local commerce versus some of the existing ones. So it's maybe a bit hard to see in the averages, but that's a bit more what's happening under the hood.

And your next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with Citizens.

It sounded like Wolt had a proud quarter in terms of frequency as well as unit economics. Can you guys just help unpack what are the improvements you guys are making in that business?

And then I wanted to go back to frequency. Frequency continues to improve in terms of the U.S. and was at all-time highs. Can you guys unpack that? Is that new verticals? Is that wider cohorts that you guys talked about maybe a year ago of people that order once a quarter now ordering once a month. Is there anything else you guys can shed in terms of light on why frequency continues to just hit new highs.

Drew, it's Ravi. I'll take the first 1 on international. Look, I mean, international business, really a strong quarter. When I think about it from a growth perspective, growth continues to be quite strong, coming from both growth in users as well as order frequency. When I look at the MAUs just for the international business, they have hit an all-time high. A lot of that is being driven by -- look, I mean, the underlying improvements we're making in the product, right? We've added more selection. We've added more categories. We have a new vertical business in international, that's also growing quite nicely.

Wolt+ has been a good addition to our overall portfolio. That's subscription program internationally. We've launched that about 2 years ago. That continues to do quite well. And when I look at the slope of the Wolt+ curve, actually, it's growing faster than DashPass at the same time. At the same time, the improvements in both quality as well as affordability that's driving people to come back to us and order more. So order frequency has also hit an all-time high.

So when I put all of that together, right, the international business, not only is it growing but we're gaining share across most of the countries that we operate in. Really proud of the progress that the team has made. And on the second point I would make is when I look at the unit economics, I mean, I mentioned that gross profit positive for overall international. That continues to be the case. And even on a unit economic basis year-over-year, we've seen a good amount of improvement.

So net-net, I mean business is from both on the top as well as the bottom line for our overall international portfolio.

Yes. Andrew, I'll take the -- Tony, I'll take the second question on frequency. The way I've always thought about this is how do we solve more and more customer problems and so that there's more than 1 way to win, so to speak, where we can actually engage customers that makes the most sense for them in terms of actually increasing their frequency. Like no customer, to put a different way, thinks about DoorDash's order frequency as a metric that they care about.

And the short answer is, it is different for different customer groups. There is obviously the introduction of new categories and new use cases. There is the introduction of DashPass and the growing benefits from DashPass. There is also improvements within each 1 of the use cases, whether it's restaurants, within restaurants, there's different occasions within meal times, for example, there's different categories, obviously, outside of restaurants. Within each 1 of those categories, there's various different things beneath that, too, so that you can actually improve each 1 of these things.

So there's no 1 thing or 2 or 3 things that drives the growth frequency. And this is, in general, how we set up a lot of our product teams so that a, it's actually solving for that specific unique customer what it is that actually solves a problem for them so that we can grow a metric we care about and then finding more than 1 way, ideally several dozen ways to win so that the growth is not only enduring, but also geometric.

And your next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali with Truist.

So 2 quick questions. One, on SevenRooms, I think that acquisition closed in early or maybe mid-June, I'm assuming, Ravi, the contribution was de minimis. But maybe just talk about, Tony, how does it unlock new opportunity for you if you had to dream the dream with kind of building a SaaS model around SevenRooms. Can you maybe just share how you kind of see that evolving for you?

And then in terms of profitability for new verticals, can you maybe, i.e, non-restaurant, can you just provide an update on how has it progressed as your growth has accelerated? Does it continue to improve on the margin? Or are you holding the profitability relatively flat to maximize top line growth?

Yes. Youssef, on the first question on SevenRooms, I'll take that one. I mean, look, we started our Commerce Platform business in the fall of '16, 2016, and in earnest in the first quarter of 2017, where we shipped DoorDash Drive. And the dual mission of the company has always been on the 1 side, we want to help you grow and bring you incremental sales, that's the job of our marketplace. And on the other side, we want to empower you to do it on your own.

So every physical business, small, medium and large inside cities can win in the digital economy. And we now have built or shipped 2 of the most successful B2B products in our category with DoorDash Drive and Storefront serving -- each serving hundreds of thousands of businesses. And -- but it still is a very small -- or solves a very small fraction of all the problems that a business needs to solve or even compared to the Doorash Marketplace, it's still a very small fraction of the product portfolio of what we built for ourselves.

And with products like SevenRoom bring is really it brings a marketing component and a data analytics component to understand all of the different customers that engage with each one of these merchants in an omnichannel 360 way. And obviously, if you can marry the best-in-class product, which we believe SevenRooms has built with the know-how as well as the data sets that Doorash has access to, I think we can build something very remarkable as a third B2B product that will be very, very successful to many, many merchants, both in restaurants and beyond.

And so I -- this is less thinking about the business model, although you're right, this is a very different type of business or B2B commerce platform, which contributes to metrics like revenue, but not GOV. But really the way I think about it is what are all the different problems we can solve. Because if you can solve all the different problems for these physical businesses, I think you're going to grow the GDP of the cities in which these businesses reside. And if you can grow the GDP of the cities, then I think that's a win for everybody.

And so that continues to be how we've always thought about this, and it's why we're really, really excited about closing the acquisition of SevenRooms.

Youssef, on SevenRooms, you're right. I mean, we are investing in the product. But from a bottom line perspective, you're not going to notice the impact in the second half compared to the rest of the portfolio.

To your second point around new verticals, I mean, look, tactically speaking, right, when you purely think about it from a unit economics perspective, yes, unit economics improved in your new vertical business year-over-year. The thing that you have to remember is like, look, we have a structural advantage. We have consumers existing on the platform. We have Dashers existing on the platform. So when you're thinking about it from a modeling perspective, right, like the flow-through from gross profit to contribution is going to be very high whenever we stand up a newer category.

I feel very good about where we are on unit economics. What we are focused on is driving scale in the business. Look, ultimately, what we're trying to do is the same playbook, right? We're trying to improve the unit economics, take that, reinvest that back in the business to drive retention as well as order frequency because that ultimately drive scale rise, efficiency in the business. And you're seeing that come through in the business, right? When I talk about Q2, to Deepak's question earlier. Look, I mean, cohort sizes are increasing, both new as well as existing or new verticals, order frequency is growing. And at the same time, the unit economics are improving. We feel really good about the performance. We feel business is scaling, and we're going to continue to scale that business.

And your next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

I wanted to ask a bit more about DashPass, approve the -- I appreciate disclosure on the quarter. So what has been basically the kind of most effective method for growing DashPass users? Does it differ by country? And then talk about how some of the co-marketing partners have played into the DashPass expansion?

Jason, it's Tony. I'll take this one. I don't know which earnings call, I may have said this before, but look, when it comes to DashPass, the 80% in the 80-20 of DashPass has always been, first and foremost, make the product more useful, make DoorDash, make Wolt more useful. And the more useful we can make it, the more likely that a product like Wolt+ or DashPass will actually get used. We don't want any leakage in the system. We want a product that people see a large multiple in terms of the benefits they receive versus the amount they have to pay for the subscription. That's the 80, that continues to be the 80%. There's no 1 thing that contributes to the 80%. And so it's mostly an obsession over focusing on every product detail and in increasing the number of benefits.

The 20% though, to your point, in my opinion, gets earned after you achieve the 80%, which is if you can achieve the 80% and build the best-in-class products are the most useful ones, and I can't think of any other program that can connect or get used as often, if you can maximize the number of connections between consumers and businesses, then you can achieve the 20%, which is to build a successful partner ecosystem.

We've been very lucky in that where starting in in 2018, 2019, we partnered with Chase. And we haven't done that many of these, but we tend to go deep and partner with a few like-minded partners. More recently, we partnered with T-Mobile where we get to go super deep in ways that benefit both audiences from both companies. But that really is the 20%, and it can only happen if we've actually built the most useful products to start with. And so that continues to be with the focus for both DashPass and Wolt+ are.

And your next question comes from the line of Michael McGovern with Bank of America.

I have 2, maybe 1 for Tony and 1 for Ravi. Curious on the Cocoa Robotics partnership for Sidewalk Robots that I think, occurred in April. Any insight into how that launch has gone in L.A. and Chicago or any other new thoughts on robotic delivery methods?

And then second, it looks like the AOV or basket size has continued to see this uptick in growth for a couple of quarters in a row now. Anything to call out there in terms of -- or just normal kind of growth in food costs?

Yes. Michael, I'll take the first question on robotics. Our work in robotics started in 2017 when we were really trying to understand how autonomous delivery can actually be shaped and built and ultimately commercialized. And I think the biggest thing that we've learned there is that doing autonomous delivery is actually very different from doing autonomous passenger driving or robotaxis. And that's because, obviously, in a passenger context, the passenger can walk in and walk out of the car, even if the drop off or pickup locations aren't perfect. But in the case of delivery, that's obviously not true.

And in order to make sure that you can make autonomous delivery happen and achieve its full potential, you kind of have to solve for the end-to-end system. And that's kind of probably the single biggest learning we've had.

And so we made a few partnerships as noted in your question. Those have gone great. We definitely see great potential in building that out. But we've also done our own work as well. And so we don't have any announcements to make at the time, but it's something that we've been studying and working on for several years now, and it's something we're very excited about.

Mike, on the second point, I think you're probably looking at the AOV for the overall business. I mean, look, largely as a result of mix shift. We are seeing new verticals become a larger portion of the business. Even within new verticals, what you are seeing is an increase in basket sizes as users try to use us for more use cases. A lot of that is being driven by the underlying improvements we've made in the product. We have more selection than ever before, the underlying product continues to get better and more easier to use. That's what's driving the higher baskets in new verticals. But the overall AOV at the total company level is largely a mix shift to new verticals.

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

While we appreciate grocery seems to be a big priority today. Can you maybe update us on the sales of your retail business and the indications on the pace of growth here? How unit economics are trending? And how you may be thinking about investing a bit more aggressively in this vertical?

And then maybe an update on drone delivery, if you could, some regulatory news in the U.S. making it easier. You guys have been running some tests in Europe as it relates to drone delivery. I guess how do you see that product perhaps changing the unit economics of your business over time? And how do you think about maybe leveraging partners versus building yourself?

Yes. Lee, it's Tony. Maybe I'll take both and feel free to add, Ravi. The first question on retail. I mean, retail is a really exciting business for us. I mean, it's kind of -- it reminds me a bit of where it is today kind of where grocery was for us maybe in 2021, something like that. Put it a different way, we're just at the beginning, and we're just scratching the surface.

I think the biggest learning that we've had on retail is that it is just very, very different buying something that is nonperishable and also very different based on each category in terms of the SKU depth or the item coverage that you need to build a product that actually addresses real customer problems as well as everything from redoing the entire shopping experience to the post checkout experience and all of that.

And so all of this to say that it's a sizable business growing for us today, growing super fast, but it is so early in terms of where it is as a product. And so back to 1 of the comments I made earlier on this call, I think it tends to get underestimated the number of things you can do to improve a product or the amount of time it takes to actually do it. And then once you do it, the customer says, thank you, and then they say, what's next?

And so those expectations always go up. And so -- we had a long, long, long ways to go in retail. We may be a leader or perhaps even the leader in third party today in that category. But I would say, as a product, it is a baby in terms of where we are.

The second question, I think was about drones. You're right. We're first, excited -- very excited about some of the recent work that we and others have done with the administration and, hopefully, greenlighting drone delivery in the U.S. As you kind of noted in your question, other parts of the world actually have kind of come to this development even before the U.S. And we've done a lot of that with partners like Google Wing, for example, we've announced other partnerships as well in other parts of the world. And we're very excited about those partnerships.

The way I think about how this plays out, and we'll have more to share later, but it's that you kind of have to think about all the different use cases and you got to solve for the end-to-end system because it's not just the vehicle itself, in this case, whether you're talking about a drone or in the case earlier of the previous question about a land vehicle, those products in themselves, as complicated as they are, actually only addresses maybe 20% of the complexity to actually deliver something that I think could be scalable, economically viable and most importantly, actually solve customer problems in a way that human drivers could not.

And so a lot of work needs to be done. We certainly have very strong points of view given that we've been working on this for about 8 years at this point, and we look forward to sharing at some point in the future.

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

Tony, you've made so many impressive improvements to the platform, and we can see it in the results. Let me ask you a little bit of a tricky one. Can you talk to us about the areas where you've had more challenges than you expected in sort of improving the product, improving the customer experience, improving the merchant service. What are those areas that are proving to be harder that we should sort of look for the next unlocks to come from long term on the platform? .

Yes. Brian, I wish you get to have a peek into my inbox because I guess several hundred e-mails a week from all of our audiences, whether it's consumers, Dashers or merchants. And I don't know if they think that our improvements are very impressive. Those e-mails tend to perhaps suggest the opposite, which is a daily reminder given that I've done customer support now daily for each day for the last 12 years that we seem to be falling short actually.

So I'm not so sure that I agree with the premise of the question. It's not tricky at all the question because I actually think we're pretty far behind in each 1 of the areas that -- from the perspective of the customer, not the perspective of what our business metrics suggest for our competitive position.

And so look, I mean, this is true. Maybe we can take an example of this morning. I received an e-mail about how we showed up at the wrong parking lot inside an apartment complex. And that caused both a delay in delivery as well as a fear that perhaps the driver wasn't even going to show up. And so whether it's very small things like that, that sounds very small, but when you compound them to the billions of orders that we do to understanding how do we play now in new geographies or new categories or how might the product often change given where the world is going with AI or how business models might be adding complexity to our own business. We talked a bit about SaaS earlier. I would say there are many areas, Brian, in which we're struggling. And every day, I think, is a daily struggle where the job is to try to make an improvement for that day.

And 1 of the things I've learned over the last 12 years of doing this is if you can actually do that, you'd be surprised at both how how much progress you can make over a year, but also how systemically you can actually create an environment, a team that actually knows how to repeat this in any new domain, which I think is the most important skill in a world where things are changing ever so fast and frankly, increasingly faster every hour of the day.

And that's kind of what I keep stressing to the teams. If we -- how to make the next improvement. So is there 1 area that I feel like, oh, there's been -- it's been harder to crack than another? The answer is no, because I literally talk to our customers every single day, and it seems like we got opportunities everywhere.

There's no further questions at this time. That concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.