Uber, which paid $1.1 billion to acquire the US-based alcohol delivery application firm Drizly in 2021, has announced that it is closing.
Three years after the acquisition, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Senior Vice President of Delivery at Uber, announced the decision, citing the company’s “core Uber Eats strategy” as the motivating factor.
Uber gave users a wide array of alternatives by incorporating Drizly’s extensive variety of beer, wine, and spirits into its Eats app.
Drizly continued to provide consumers with a specialized platform for alcohol delivery even after this combination.
Gore-Coty thanked the Drizly team for their contributions to the expansion of the beverage and alcohol delivery category and said, “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.”
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A possible cybersecurity risk is brought up by the decision to shut down Drizly, especially in light of the company’s 2020 data breach event
Following Uber’s acquisition, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) discovered that Drizly CEO James Cory Rellas was informed of security concerns as early as 2018. The breach exposed the information of 2.5 million customers.
The FTC concluded that Drizly’s failure to put in place sufficient protections allowed for the data breach. Consequently, the FTC directed Drizly to delete unnecessary personal information and required Rellas to put strong information security policies in place for any CEO position he might have in the future.
It is unclear how exactly cybersecurity concerns factored into Uber’s decision, but the business is determined to keep offering alcohol delivery services via its primary Uber Eats platform.
Uber’s strategic evolution has reached a turning point with the shutdown of Drizly, underscoring the company’s commitment to improving and streamlining its core service offerings.
