It’s closing time for alcohol delivery app Drizly: Uber, which acquired the company three years ago for $1.1 billion, has announced that it will shutter the service in March 2024, multiple sources report.
Uber had planned to integrate Drizly into the Uber Eats app while continuing to maintain a separate Drizly app, but those integrations may have hit a roadblock due to the inherent differences in the way the two businesses operated, according to Axios. Unlike Uber, Drizly doesn’t hire or contract delivery workers, but rather provides tech to enable liquor stores to offer their own deliveries.
Drizly also caused problems for Uber when it came under FTC scrutiny for flawed security measures, which resulted in a 2020 data hack that impacted 2.5 million customers. While the hack happened before Uber’s 2021 acquisition of Drizly, the resulting FTC investigation led to a series of new data controls for the company that restricted the types of customer information it could collect and retain.
And throughout all of this, Uber continued to build out the partnerships and offerings for its Uber Eats service, including alcohol delivery. “After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we’ve decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything — from food to groceries to alcohol — all on a single app,” said Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Uber’s SVP of Delivery in a statement shared with several media outlets. “We’re grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the beverage alcohol delivery category as the original industry pioneer.”
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