Uber bought the online alcohol retailer for $1.1 billion as its popularity soared during the pandemic
Uber $UBER has closed up the tab on its alcohol delivery app Drizly. Uber bought the online alcohol retailer for $1.1 billion in October 2021. Uber acquired the company after it blew up to become the biggest online store for alcohol nationwide during pandemic.
Now it’s no more.
“We have shut things down,” Drizly said Thursday on a page on its website titled “Drizly Farewell FAQs.”
Drizly’s partnership with Uber was considered offbeat from the get-go, in part because the company ran its business separately from Uber’s.
Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Uber’s senior vice president of delivery, told Axios in January that after three years, the company had decided to close down Drizly to focus on its “core Uber Eats strategy” — getting customers food, groceries, and alcohol through a single app.
Drizly’s shutdown may have been partly due to a Federal Trade Commission finding that the company had faced a cybersecurity attack that exposed the information of 2.5 million customers.
Uber said in February that it would lay off more than 160 Drizly employees. Uber’s ambitious growth plans since buying Drizly have continued to stagger, according to a Bloomberg study.
Operations for the Drizly app on Uber have ended.
Drizly says that customers will not be able to use any existing credits or discounts that they had. Customers with a Drizly account will not be automatically transferred over and will need to create an Uber account.
If customers had a scheduled gift to be delivered after March, they should receive a refund directly from Drizly, the company says. And customers should use their Drizly promotions on Drizly’s platform before March ends.
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