DoorDash

Liquid AI

DoorDash

DoorDash operates a three-sided marketplace connecting restaurants, delivery drivers (Dashers), and consumers. Revenue comes from three streams: commissions charged to restaurants (typically 15-30% of the order value), delivery fees and service fees charged to consumers, and DashPass subscription revenue ($9.99/month for free delivery and reduced fees).

The DashPass subscription is the retention engine. Over 18 million subscribers pay monthly whether they order or not, creating predictable recurring revenue.

Subscribers order more frequently (about 4x more than non-subscribers), increasing order volume.

Advertising is the emerging high-margin business. Restaurants pay for promoted listings and sponsored placements in the app.

This is essentially a search advertising business built on top of a logistics network. Ad revenue has grown to over $1 billion annually — and it's nearly pure profit because it costs almost nothing to display an ad.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

DoorDash

Tony Xu grew up watching his mother work multiple restaurant jobs after the family immigrated from Nanjing, China to Illinois. She washed dishes, waited tables, and cooked — sometimes all in the same week at different restaurants.

That experience gave Xu an unusual understanding of how brutally hard the restaurant business is.

At Stanford in 2012, Xu and classmates Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore were in a startup class looking for a business idea. They interviewed over 200 small business owners and kept hearing the same problem: restaurants wanted to offer delivery but couldn't afford to hire drivers.

Domino's and Pizza Hut had fleets. Your local Thai place didn't.

Their solution was comically low-tech. They built a one-page website called PaloAltoDelivery.com, listed menus from local restaurants (without asking permission), and put their personal phone numbers on the site.

When orders came in, they drove the food themselves. The first order was pad thai from a restaurant in Palo Alto.

Within months, they were drowning in orders and realized this was a massive business. They incorporated as DoorDash in January 2013 and got into Y Combinator that summer.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

DoorDash

DoorDash won the US market through obsessive focus on suburban and mid-market restaurants — the segments Uber Eats and Grubhub ignored. While competitors fought over Manhattan and San Francisco, DoorDash was onboarding every Chinese restaurant and pizza shop in Tucson and Des Moines.

By the time competitors noticed, DoorDash had locked up the majority of US restaurants.

The "last-mile logistics" expansion is the long game. DoorDash now delivers groceries (partnerships with Albertsons, Rite Aid), convenience items (DashMart dark stores), alcohol, pet supplies, and retail products.

The thesis is that once you have a network of drivers and a consumer habit of ordering through an app, you can deliver anything — not just food.

The Wolt acquisition for $8.1 billion in 2022 was the international play. Instead of grinding through country-by-country expansion, DoorDash bought the leading delivery platform in 23 countries across Europe and Asia.

Wolt brought strong unit economics and a beloved brand, especially in the Nordics.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

DoorDash

Profitability has been the constant question. DoorDash lost money every year through its IPO and beyond, finally posting its first full year of profit in 2024.

The food delivery business has razor-thin margins — restaurants want lower commissions, drivers want higher pay, and consumers want lower prices. Squeezing profit from that three-way tension is incredibly hard.

Regulatory risk is real and growing. Cities and states have capped delivery commissions (New York City caps at 15% for delivery, 5% for marketing).

Worker classification lawsuits keep coming — are Dashers employees or independent contractors? California's Prop 22 temporarily settled this for California, but the debate rages everywhere else.

Each new regulation shaves margin.

Uber Eats is the forever competitor. Uber's massive ride-sharing network gives them built-in driver supply and brand recognition.

They're willing to lose money on Eats to keep their broader ecosystem sticky. DoorDash and Uber Eats together control about 90% of US delivery, and neither can afford to cede ground.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

DoorDash

DoorDash Marketplace — the core food delivery platform connecting consumers to 390,000+ restaurant partners across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Germany. DashPass — a subscription program offering $0 delivery fees and reduced service fees for $9.99/month.

The loyalty engine of the entire business. DoorDash Drive — a white-label delivery service that lets any business (not just restaurants) use DoorDash's driver network to fulfill their own orders.

Basically DoorDash as a logistics API. DoorDash for Business — a corporate platform for team meals, employee benefits, and office food programs.

Wolt — the European food delivery platform DoorDash acquired for $8.1 billion in 2022, now the company's international expansion vehicle.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

DoorDash

Sequoia Capital has been the most consequential investor, leading multiple rounds and backing Tony Xu from Y Combinator onward. Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and SoftBank Vision Fund participated in growth rounds.

Y Combinator was the starting point (Summer 2013 batch). The December 2020 IPO raised $3.4 billion at a $39 billion valuation, making it one of the biggest tech IPOs of that year.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.