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After acquiring Edinburgh-based Cultivate, Deliveroo will launch a new fintech hub in the Scottish city.
Yesterday (31 July), London-based food delivery start-up Deliveroo announced that it has acquired a Scottish software design and development start-up called Cultivate.
In recent years, Deliveroo has partnered with the Edinburgh firm to help build payments systems for the delivery service. The two companies said that the acquisition will allow them to “continue to work on improving the payments experience for couriers and partner restaurants”, while providing both with more data.
Cultivate’s chief commercial officer, Andy Robinson, said: “Deliveroo [has] bought Cultivate entirely and all of our team are joining Deliveroo as employees.
“A lot of the work that we’ve been doing over the past few years has been with Deliveroo, and this gives us an opportunity to scale the team and build a fantastic place to work. As a team, we viewed this as being the best opportunity for us to continue to do our best work.”
Deliveroo is also set to launch a new fintech hub in Edinburgh, where Cultivate is headquartered. This hub will house 50 tech jobs within the next three years, trebling the current workforce. It will be made up of engineers, product managers, user researchers, designers and data scientists.
Deliveroo’s vice-president of engineering, Dan Winn, said: “As a British company, Deliveroo is proud to be investing in Edinburgh and creating more high-skilled jobs in the UK.
“Edinburgh is one of the UK’s fastest growing tech hubs, with access to an excellent talent pool of highly skilled people and university graduates.”
The food delivery giant, which has 80,000 registered restaurants and 60,000 riders across 500 cities in Europe and beyond, promised to continue backing the community initiatives that Cultivate already supports.
These include Prewired, an organisation that helps young people learn to code, and Codebar, which helps underrepresented groups develop software engineering skills.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s massive $575m investment into Deliveroo remains stalled by UK regulators as an investigation into competition concerns continues.
