Tech & Innovation - April 20, 2022

Delivery Hero pushes the boundaries of innovation through its global tech hubs

  • Delivery Hero’s 10+ global tech hubs deliver solutions for its local brands, aiming to enhance the user experience, shorten iteration cycles and foster a culture of innovation
  • At EXPO 2022, talabat’s delivery robots completed orders on the ground in under 20 minutes
  • New digital tools support foodpanda’s community of merchants to grow their business
  • Woowa’s chatbot system can handle up to 14% of cancellations, improving customer service capabilities
  • PedidosYa has implemented new software to support agile practices for developers

Berlin, 20 April 2022 – At Delivery Hero, we have set up our tech and product teams in such a way to enable local innovation to be scaled for impact globally. With over ten tech hubs on four continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America), our teams design and implement solutions which not only enhance the overall customer experience and shorten iteration cycles, but also foster a culture of innovation. Investing in diverse tech talent from the ground up, we are also committed to being a role model for the industry.

We have built up an amazing and diverse global tech team, based in different hubs around the world. This allows us to successfully develop and implement a full suite of proprietary tech solutions to enhance the service we provide to customers, vendors, and riders. Innovation allows us to explore new business opportunities which are tightly integrated with our core platform.

Christian Hardenberg, CTO of Delivery Hero

Last-mile delivery with robots at EXPO in Dubai

talabat, one of Delivery Hero’s local brands in the MENA region, played a key role at the recent EXPO 2020 in Dubai, having designed and developed closed compartment autonomous robots for safe, contactless and secure food delivery. This is the first time that the “tala-bots” have been integrated into the delivery fleet. Notably, the talabat EXPO tech and product team successfully developed an app flow customized for events. They also created ordering kiosks (contact-free ordering for customers) and integrated physical card payments into the app checkout flow in record time, strengthening last-mile delivery. 

Khaled Rashad, CTO of talabat, said:At EXPO, we completed thousands of orders with robots, covering a span of over 10,000 km, with an average delivery time of 20 minutes. This project highlights exactly how our proprietary technology can be used to complement last-mile delivery.” 

Yi-Wei Ang, CPO of talabat, added: “Customers at EXPO loved interacting and receiving their food from robots. Trialing robots and drones in the MENA region has shown the benefit of such innovation to support our existing fleet of riders as well as improve customer satisfaction.”

Digitalizing our community of merchants

In Asia, foodpanda continues to help hundreds of thousands of small business owners to digitalize and stay on top of changing customer preferences. New digital tools such as “pandamerchant” (suppliers app) and “pandapro” (subscription program) help these businesses grow revenue streams and target new customers beyond their physical locations. 

Benjamin Mann, CTO of foodpanda, said:Technology drives digital empowerment, and supports our community to grow thriving businesses. We continue to improve and iterate on our tech solutions to deliver happiness and convenience to customers and merchants.”

Improving the customer experience with chatbots

In Seoul, the Woowa team has implemented a chatbot system within the order cancellation phase to streamline the company’s customer service capabilities and improve the overall experience. In line with ambitions to make new strides as a global food tech company, this highlights how Woowa continues to iterate on the technological side of the customer journey to provide a high quality service.

Song Jae-ha, CTO of Woowa Brothers, said: Upon release of this system, over 14% of total order cancellations were handled by the chatbot. We expect this number to continue to increase, reducing operating costs, improving customer response time, and overall increasing satisfaction for both customers and partners.”

Streamlined software for quicker development in Buenos Aires

The PedidosYa tech department in Buenos Aires has created a new software program known as “Jarvis”, that supports its engineering teams to innovate and iterate in a shorter period of time. In essence, the Jarvis app automates and removes manual aspects of the development process, from mobile to web or backend. 

Gabriel Eisbruch, CTO of PedidosYa, said: To enable our tech teams to scale at speed, we wanted to remove bottlenecks, giving them time to focus on what truly matters: creating new and exciting features for consumers. Jarvis supports our engineers to build what they need, when they need it, without unnecessary roadblocks. This reduces time to production and allows teams to fully own their code, be accountable for quality, and bring transparency and traceability on what’s being moved into production.” 

Developing local talent and lowering barriers to a career in tech

Delivery Hero continues to invest into talent development, and has plans to launch its second edition of the Delivery Hero Tech Academy (“DHTA”) in Berlin later this year. This follows the completion of a successful first edition in 2021. The 9.5-month-long program equips students with the knowledge of relevant coding languages to start a career as an entry-level engineer. It also includes an internship in one of the company’s tech teams. foodpanda in Singapore and Woowa in Seoul are also currently running similar programs to support the attraction and retention of local tech talent. 

Global spaces for collaboration

Technology hubs in different regions enable global teams to invest in tech capabilities, develop a great talent pool, and share best practices. This requires state-of-the-art spaces. In February, the foodpanda APAC team, based in Singapore, moved into a new tech hub location in the HQ office. More recently in March, talabat Egypt opened its second regional hub in the new Cairo headquarters. In Berlin, plans to open an innovation hub are underway. In Istanbul, local brand Yemeksepeti is currently migrating its Turkish technology platform into Delivery Hero’s global setup to foster even more synergies. 


Discover more about tech and innovation at Delivery Hero by visiting the website here.


ABOUT DELIVERY HERO
Delivery Hero is the world’s leading local delivery platform, operating its service in around 50 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa. The company started as a food delivery service in 2011 and today runs its own delivery platform on four continents. Additionally, Delivery Hero is pioneering quick commerce, the next generation of e-commerce, aiming to bring groceries and household goods to customers in under one hour and often in 10 to 15 minutes. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Delivery Hero is listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange since 2017, and became part of the leading index DAX (Deutscher Aktienindex) in 2020. For more information, please visit www.deliveryhero.com

MEDIA CONTACT
Lena Carlson
Manager, Global Tech & Product Communications
+49 0159 0168 4611
moc.orehyrevilednull@sserp


DISCLAIMER

This release may contain forward-looking statements, estimates, opinions and projections with respect to anticipated future performance or activities of Delivery Hero SE (“forward-looking statements”). These forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology, including the terms “believes,” “estimates,” “anticipates,” “expects,” “intends,” “may,” “will” or “should” or, in each case, their negative, or other variations or comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements include all matters that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are based on the current views, expectations, assumptions and objectives of the management of Delivery Hero SE. We accept no liability whatsoever in respect of the achievement of such forward-looking statements.

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