Delivery giant Glovo sets up shop in Poland, acquiring Pizza Portal and opening new tech hub

Delivery giant Glovo sets up shop in Poland, acquiring Pizza Portal and opening new tech hub

Glovo, the fast-growing delivery company, has announced big moves in the Polish market: buying the local food delivery platform Pizza Portal and opening its second technology and engineering hub in Warsaw. The Barcelona-based, globally-operating delivery platform has acquired Pizza Portal, the second largest food-service platform in Poland, for up to €35 million. The agreement was signed in August by AmRest Holdings, the leading multi-brand franchise restaurant operator in Europe.

Further establishing itself in the Polish tech ecosystem, Glovo will open its second hub in Warsaw, the first one outside of Spain.

“When it came to finding a location for our second technology hub, we were spoilt for choice in Europe, but Poland was consistently a strong contender. We wanted to locate our hub in a unique location that is ripe for growth and innovation, and Poland is a hotbed for new talent that we feel is yet to be fully recognised by the world’s technology ecosystem,” said Mustafa Sezgin, Glovo’s VP of Engineering. 

The office will start out with 40 new engineering roles for backend, mobile and web software engineers, plus around 50 more roles for tech and product experts, such as engineering managers, product managers and a new Director of Engineering. But that’s just the beginning of a much larger plan. Glovo aims to build a 300-strong engineering team to support other platform innovations, such as SuperGlovo, dark supermarkets enabling 24/7 grocery delivery to customers within 20 minutes of placing the order.

Rapid growth and expansion is hardly a surprise from Glovo. In 2018, the service launched in a new city every four days on average and currently operates in 26 countries. Just this past April, the Spanish company raised a $169 million Series D round led by Lakestar.

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