Wonder: from restaurant to software

The US-based restaurant group Wonder closed a Series D of more than $650 million in July at a $9 billion valuation, with Accel, GV and NEA returning alongside new backers AllianceBernstein, Cathie Wood's ARK Invest and Kayne Anderson. The round brings total funding to roughly $3 billion since 2018, a period in which Wonder has folded in Grubhub and Blue Apron. It now runs 135 food halls across ten East Coast states. And that is just the beginning: founder and CEO Marc Lore says Wonder will be ready and prepared to go public early next year. Lore is asking public markets to believe a restaurant group can carry software-style multiples, built on a kitchen-as-platform model running up to 30 concepts out of one space. For consumer goods companies, the question is increasingly whether value sits in the product or in the operating system around it. Wonder is betting that proprietary technology, customer data and operational orchestration deserve software multiples. Investors are increasingly rewarding businesses that own the customer relationship, the operating system and the underlying data layer rather than simply manufacturing or distributing products. As AI continues to compress execution advantages, those integrated platforms are likely to capture a disproportionate share of value creation. (Fortune)