UK-based food delivery company Deliveroo is planning to hire more than 300 people at its London office, with vacancies ranging from software engineering and algorithm development, to behavioural economics.
As per the company’s claims, last year its rate of orders increased by 650%, in spite of fierce competition from Uber, Amazon and JustEat.
Deliveroo already has a workforce of about 1000 across 12 countries, working with more than 20,000 restaurants in 130 cities.
With the new recruitment drive, it will increase its workforce by a third this year.
The company saw 25% month-on-month growth in orders last year, with rate of orders increasing by ten times when compared to the beginning of 2015.
Deliveroo founder and CEO Will Shu noted that the company was set up in London, with a plan to export British-born technology around the world.
Deliveroo was founded in 2013 and has raised about $472m from UK investors including Bridgepoint, Accel Partners and Index Ventures.
Despite soaring orders, the company has been facing losses from 2014. In that year, it reported a loss of about £1.4m and in 2015, the losses mounted to £18.1m. The drastic increase in losses has been attributed to its international expansion.
Apart from this issue, lately Deliveroo’s freelance bicycle riders have been demanding more workers’ rights. One of the basic demands is to classify them as workers instead of self-employed contractors, BBC reported.
And last summer, the company proposed to change the rates from £7.00 to £3.75 per delivery. The proposed change was criticised by the riders and Deliveroo had to back down from the idea.
Last year, Facebook announced plans to hire about 500 tech employees for its new London headquarters, which will begin operations in 2017. Google also announced similar plans and it proposed to hire about 3000 employees at its London office by 2020.
