Great. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Saving the best for last.
All right.
I'm Jack Adarkar. I cover U.S. TMT spec sales here at J.P. Morgan . We're pleased to have DoorDash CFO Ravi Inukonda with us today. DoorDash's mission is to empower and grow local economies. DoorDash should become one of the world's largest local e-commerce platforms. We estimate that its industry-leading food delivery share in the U.S. is north of 60%. Ravi joined DoorDash in 2018 as VP of Finance and Strategy, became CFO in March 2023. Prior to that, Ravi spent about three years as head of finance at Uber Eats, and prior to that was in the VC space. Welcome, Ravi.
Thank you for having me.
Kicking off with background, big picture. As I said, DoorDash's mission is to grow and empower local economies. You started with restaurants and have now moved to grocery, convenience, retail. As we look 5 to 10 years down the line, how do you think about incremental opportunities within these categories?
Sure. We also do alcohol, by the way. 5:00 P.M. on a Tuesday evening. I'm sure Doug and Jack here are not offering alcohol, but I would open up your DoorDash app and, you know, get yourself a beer. But, yeah, I mean, you know, the mission of the company has always been the same since day one. Our goal has been to help local businesses. We want to grow local businesses. We want to support them in a digital economy. We want them to thrive. We think we want to support local businesses both on-premise as well as off-premise because they're getting more and more integrated. We want every local business to be omnichannel. We started the business about a decade ago with one product, which is restaurant delivery in the U.S.. And today we have, you know, many products. We cover over, you know, 30-plus countries.
The ultimate goal has always been the same, right? Continue to focus on the product. As we've thought about the business, there are sort of two dimensions, you know, sort of strategy-wise that we've taken. The first one is our marketplace business. Think of that as our demand generation engine. Think of that as our consumer acquisition engine. We started that with restaurants. Today we've expanded that to, you know, many more categories, you know, outside of restaurants. When we look at the opportunity to your question, I mean, we still feel like it's very, very early. I mean, if you just imagine, right, like we offer categories that people use on a daily basis, but consumers still do not come to the app on a daily basis, right?
Like the number of users that come to us, order with us every single, you know, day or every single month is still a small fraction of the people that we cover. Just take Mother's Day, for example, right? Like this past weekend, we were number four on the App Store because people started to realize DoorDash is, you know, being more than just restaurant delivery, right? People are ordering flowers. People are ordering other products. When I look at the selection or the quality or the categories available on the platform, I think there's still a lot of opportunity for us on the core marketplace or the demand generation side. The second approach to strategy we've taken is what we think of as a business-to-business services strategy. We started that. We call that our commerce platform. We started that business about seven or eight years ago.
The first, you know, sort of product that we released there was Drive, which essentially was logistics as a service. We said we want to help merchants, you know, power their own channel. We said the logistics comes from DoorDash, but the consumer entry point is on the merchant's own channel. We extended that a few years back. We said we are going to power the merchant's website as well. That product is called Storefront. Now, the more recent acquisition that we've done, SevenRooms, is essentially an extension of that strategy where we're going and saying, "Hey, what other services can we provide to merchants?" Because ultimately we want merchants to be able to do their business both online with us, with the marketplace, as well as power their own, you know, interfaces, power their own in-store experiences as well.
The advantage we have is we have a distribution network. We have the technology. We have the data. We have the analytics that can power some of the merchant services solutions along with the marketplace that we have. When I think about the opportunity over the next, you know, five to ten years, going back to your point, a lot of opportunity to grow users, a lot of opportunity to grow the use cases on the marketplace side, a lot of opportunity for us to, A, build and extend the services that we have today as a part of our B2B offering, but also extend more services in the future.
Great. Obligatory macro question. So.
Sure.
You guys have continued to see healthy consumer demand, despite everything that's going on around us. How do you think about the resilience of restaurants and other verticals?
Sure. I mean, we don't spend, you know, sort of like a lot of time on macro because we're not waking up to the journal saying, "Hey, you know, the economy is doing well," or "The economy is not doing great," right? Like if you think about it, we get 8 million signals every single day. Like the volume today is going to be about 8 million. We look a lot at our own internal metrics to see what we are seeing. We have a team of analysts that are focused on poring through the data to figure out, like, "Hey, what's actually going on in the business?" When we look at the underlying cohorts, I mean, they've been pretty strong. We look at low-income versus high-income zip codes.
We look at, you know, the various parts, you know, of the country, whether it is the coast or the middle of the country. The demand patterns continue to be very strong. We ask, you know, why has that been the case? Even if you think about the last four or five years when the economy went through like a bunch of different, you know, gyrations, whether it is COVID or markets reopening or, you know, peak inflation, the business continued to be pretty resilient. I think there are two broad reasons. One is the category itself is pretty resilient. If you just think about it, right, like people spend the most amount of time on food. People eat 21 times a week, whether it is food or groceries. The categories themselves have been very defensible.
If you look at the defensibility of the categories over the last, you know, five or six decades, even at different times of economic downturns, food in general as a category has been pretty resilient, not just on our platform, in general, food services. The second one is the product has gotten better. If I look at our product compared to five years ago, if you look at our product even two years ago, the product continues to get better. We have more categories today, which we did not have before. We have more stores today that we did not have before. DashPasses continue to grow.
I think the combination of the resilience of the category itself, plus the fact that the product continues to get better, which is obviously something that we work on on a daily basis, I think that's, you know, partly the reason for what you're seeing in terms of the overall demand continuing to be extremely strong on the platform.
Hypothetically, if you were to see some impact from the macro, can you talk a bit about how that would change your approach to running the company and potentially other areas of cost that you can leverage to ease through that?
Sure. I mean, I think it's a, you know, it's a good question. I mean, I think we are not looking for, you know, sort of like signs of weakness to change on how we operate the business. You know, I think one of the commonly misunderstood concepts about our business is we take a very long-term view to investments. We've always talked about the fact that we're constantly reinvesting back in the business. At the same time, we operate the business on a weekly basis. Even at this scale, $90 billion plus of, you know, run rate GOV, we look at the business on a weekly basis. We have weekly goals. Every single week we are poring through every line of business metrics, underlying input metrics to see, you know, what they're performing, right?
Because constantly what we're trying to adjust is where can we double down, where are opportunities for us to increase the velocity? We do that consistently no matter what. If you think about the performance of the business over the last four years, I mean, that's what's contributed to the growth in the business. Even in times where we feel like, hey, the consumer conditions are different, we have enough levers at our disposal that we can adjust the business. A natural hedge in the business is Dasher. In times where we've seen weakness on the consumer side, Dasher just becomes a natural hedge, which helps us manage the P&L. This is a business where we are focused on two things, right? One is the product experience, and the other one is the underlying metrics.
It's almost like a mathematician's dream because if you love math and if you love the product experience, it's a business where we're constantly managing minute changes almost at a basis point level to ultimately drive the long-term, you know, retention and order frequency that you're seeing in the business. You know, all that to say, right, like we have a great handle on the business, and we do that on a weekly basis.
Great. So delving into the different business lines, you've called out five key focus areas.
Sure.
U.S. restaurants, U.S. new verticals, international commerce, and ads. Starting with U.S. restaurants, food delivery is now, it's still high single-digit or single-digit penetration of restaurants.
Sure.
What do you think it's going to take to drive that penetration higher from here?
Sure. I mean, I think it's, again, I go back, right? Like I mean, the product itself, when we think about it, it's not quite where we want it to be. And we think of it across three dimensions. It's selection, quality, and affordability. Selection, I mean, you know, the one thing consistent about restaurants is new content continues to get created. You know, 20% of restaurants, you know, go out of business, you know, sort of like, you know, every single year, net new restaurants. So selection is a game where you continue to need to add more content and more selection. It's almost like a never-ending, you know, thing that we have to go after. If you don't have the selection, then the consumer is going to turn away, right?
That is why we have to constantly keep up with new selection on the platform. Quality, again, we've made a lot of improvement. If you think about where the product was, whether it's in terms of, you know, delivery times or, you know, credits and refunds or missing and incorrect or the experience that the end consumer has, but still a lot of opportunity for us because we still make a ton of mistakes. We still have a lot of defects. The goal is to continue to fix those defects as we go ahead. Finally, affordability. I mean, DashPass has been a key affordability lever for us. There are many consumers that can benefit today by being on DashPass, but they're still not on DashPass. A lot of low-hanging fruit for us to continue to improve the value proposition of DashPass.
If you think about the growth, you know, sort of like, you know, how we think about it, it's improvement in the product driven by underlying improvements in selection, quality, as well as affordability.
Okay. Thinking about that growth algorithm, how do you think about MAUs versus order frequency?
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, from a modeling perspective, I know people think of it as an equation, which is MAUs times order frequency. But I'd say that's probably a wrong way to think about it because any improvements that you do in the product ultimately will drive both. Because think about it, right? Like if consumers come back and order more with us, do you think of that as order frequency or do you think of that as retention, right? It's two sides of the same coin. For us, what we're trying to do is continue to increase the number of users on the platform. Users are still growing at a very healthy rate. At the same time, the order frequency continues to increase. Just in the Q1 results itself, MAUs have hit an all-time high.
They continue to grow at a very nice clip. Order frequency has also hit an all-time high. When I look at the underlying cohorts, the cohort behavior continues to be very healthy. Newer cohorts are joining at higher order rates than before. Older cohorts still continue to engage with us. Even cohorts as old as eight, nine years ago, they are still engaging and ordering more with us over time.
Okay. Net revenue margin take rate was a little bit lower in Q1. It was a sticking point, it felt like, on the earnings call. Can you just talk a little bit about the drivers?
Sure.
What gives you confidence that it'll step back up into Q2 and then accelerate into the back half?
Yeah. Maybe I'll talk about the drivers and then talk about, like, you know, what the, you know, confidence in the step up in the, you know, back half of the year. I mean, two simple things, right? One is Q1 is usually a stronger volume quarter for us. We see good volume in Q4 and Q1 just because the weather is colder. People order a lot more. So we invest in Dasher supply. Very seasonal. Happens all the time. Happened last year. Happened the year before. The second one, we found an opportunity to reduce average consumer fees structurally for grocery consumers within DashPass. So those are the two reasons on why take rate was lower in Q1 compared to Q4. I think more people thought of it as like, "Hey, did the promo activity go up?" The answer is flat out no.
When I look at the promo activity in Q4 versus Q1, it's fairly consistent. It actually didn't go up at all. I think the second and the more important thing is, which is important to understand is the way we operate the business. I think what we're trying to do constantly is generate improvement in unit economics, invest that back in the business as long as it meets our IRR threshold and it drives retention and order frequency. In Q1, we were sitting there. We had a lot of goodness from cost of revenue. We had a lot of goodness from other parts of the P&L. You have two choices to make. We can let it drop through the bottom line that gives rise to more EBITDA. Or if we find good opportunities, we can invest that back in the business.
Going back again, this is a highly manicured, highly managed business, right? We are managing the levers of the business on a weekly basis. When I looked at the EBITDA, that was pretty good, right? Like when you looked at EBITDA dollar growth year over year, that's roughly about 60%. Found good opportunities where we can structurally lower the fees, and that leads to more retention, more order frequency. For grocery specifically, where the business is growing, we added about six to seven percentage points of order volume share year over year. We said this is a great opportunity for us to continue to extend that lead. Again, we're doing this in a manner because we are comfortable with the unit economics of grocery. We're comfortable with the overall EBITDA dollar generation in the business. We said this is a great opportunity for us to invest.
Now, I think to your second point around what gives us confidence, right? Remember, Q2 take rate, I said on the call, is going to be higher than Q1. Second half is going to be higher than the first half. It's a couple of things. One is ads is going to continue to grow as a percentage of the overall business. Two is unit economics is business as usual. We're continuing to improve unit economics. What happens in our business is business as usual, unit economics continue to increase. There's going to be pockets in time where we say this is a good opportunity for us to take some of that and reinvest that back in the business. Q1 was one of those things. Because ultimately what we're trying to do is drive retention and order frequency. You'll see some of these variations.
Again, when you think about the GOV growth, that's been very strong, not just in Q1, but for the last several quarters. When you look at the EBITDA dollar production, we feel very comfortable because that continues to be pretty healthy and that continues to grow at a nice clip. We said there's a great opportunity to invest. We've, you know, taken advantage of that.
Great. So moving to grocery and new verticals, you said on the Q1 call that you expect to be the order volume share leader over the course of this year.
That's right.
Can you talk about what's driving those share gains, what gives you confidence, and then maybe just dig into the distinction between orders versus dollar volume?
Sure. The share gain that we talked about that we're going to be number one is based on volume, not on spend. You know, for us, I mean, what we're seeing in the business is, I mean, grocery is a, you know, four-year-old business for us, relatively new compared to our restaurant business. Today, you know, what you're seeing is more than a quarter of our monthly active users order from categories outside of restaurants. The thesis has always been when users order from multiple categories, the overall retention on the platform continues to be higher. That's exactly the same behavior that's actually happening right now on the platform. What's driving the growth that you're seeing in the business is compared to two years ago to today, we have majority of the top 20, we have majority of the top 100 grocers on the platform.
Selection on the platform has gotten better. If you've experienced the product a couple of years ago to today, overall quality of the platform continues to get better. You have a combination of, A, the selection getting better, as well as the quality getting better, which is driving more users to come back and order more with us. The key difference is we have a structural advantage because we have tens of millions of users that come to the app every day, every single month to order restaurants. We've already spent performance marketing dollars to acquire them. We've already enrolled them in DashPass. It's easier for us to point them in terms of grocery or retail versus a standalone where you have to go recreate the consumer acquisition engine. The same thing exists for Dasher, right?
You already have millions of Dashers on the platform delivering restaurants. What grocery does, in fact, is it increases the density of the platform, which means there is more volume, which means the efficiency is higher, which again gives rise to unit economics. We are sitting there saying, "Hey, this is a business where we think we can go solve the user experience. The unit economics look pretty good. They are improving when I look at the gross margin. The flow through from gross margin to contribution margin is pretty high. We think we have a unique advantage where the consumer experience we can actually solve." We actually think this is going to be a pretty large business for us over time.
Great. I want to dig into the customer portion and then the merchant portion in a bit more detail. Starting with customers, you're adding one of every two new customers to the category. Is that coming from cross-sell DashPass or is it new customers to the overall platform?
For two new verticals?
Yeah.
Yeah. I think, broader question is what's the customer profile for, you know, new verticals look like, right? Still, majority of the consumers to new verticals join the platform for our restaurants, and then they cross-sell over to grocery. What you are seeing is today, some new users start their journey with grocery as the first order. That percentage and that number is continuing to increase. People are discovering DoorDash for grocery as their first order, and that number continues to increase. The majority is this concept of cross-sell where consumers are using both restaurants as well as grocery. I get a lot of questions from investors saying, "Hey, you know, what does a grocery business look like? What does a restaurant business look like? Are you acquiring consumers just for grocery?" No, we're acquiring consumers to join the platform.
You will eventually get to a point where users will just come to us. They will use us for everyday local needs, right? Whether it is grocery, retail, Sephora, you are just going to have a marketplace where people continue to use us for multiple categories and the overall retention will continue to increase.
Taking the merchant side, you mentioned that the majority of the top 20 grocers are with you at the moment. Can you talk a little bit about how those conversations have evolved, and how it's changed over time?
Sure. I mean, if you'd asked me about five years ago, I would have said selection was going to be a hill to climb. Today we feel pretty comfortable, right? We have most of the major grocers on the platform. When we go talk to some of these grocers, what they tell us is two things, right? One is, A, it's incremental to the sales that they're already seeing. That's why this concept of exclusivity, I don't think will, you know, exist in a few years. I think every grocer will be on every platform. Two is we're driving same-store sales growth for them. Two, what we hear is the quality of our interaction is much better because we've spent so much time on the integration of quality between us and the grocer, between us and the consumer. They are pretty happy with the quality on the platform.
Now what you're starting to see is in some of the top 10-20 grocers, we're already number one in terms of volume share, even though many of those grocers we've just onboarded in the last couple of years. Overall, as a platform, we think we're going to be number one in the next, you know, call it year. Even in some of the individual labels or individual brands, we've already gotten to being number one in terms of order volume share. In terms of the unit economics, we feel pretty good about where they are.
Great. Shifting to international, can you talk about how you think about your current level of scale? Obviously, recently announced their Deliveroo acquisition, and where you think you need to get to over time.
Sure. Let me start, you know, three years ago, we partnered with Wolt. That was, you know, middle of, you know, 2022. Roughly, it's been about three years. I partnered with Miki and team who, you know, we thought very highly of at the time of the acquisition. That was part of the criteria, you know, for, you know, the partnership there. We're very pleased with the performance. Overall, international is growing substantially faster than peers. It's obviously growing faster than our core restaurants business. We've gained share. We are either number one or number two in terms of, you know, spend share in more than 20 countries. The overall international portfolio is gross profit positive. We feel really good about users, order frequency, which continues to increase. We launched Wolt Plus, you know, roughly about 18 months ago.
That business continues to scale, which is similar to DashPass in the U.S.. Overall, when we look at the current footprint from an international perspective, we still see a lot of opportunity. We're continuing to grow users, continuing to grow order frequency. At the same time, the other key learning we've had is our team has executed extremely well. We looked at it and said the team actually has bandwidth to do more. That's part of the reason why we said we're going to partner with Deliveroo because Miki and team have done a great job with Wolt. Now we're saying, "Hey, we can expand that and we can cover, you know, continental Europe with the partnership with Deliveroo, which gives us access to nine countries, which are complementary with, you know, no overlap at all.
Thinking about structural differences, U.S. versus international, we touched on this briefly off stage, but I've spent some of my career looking at the European players.
Right.
One of the things that's surprised me, U.S. versus Europe, is just the inherent cyclicality of Europe. Maybe if you can touch on what you think about that cyclicality and any other structural differences you'd call out.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I don't think too much about the structural differences because, I mean, it's very similar even in the U.S., right? Operating in New York is, you know, very different from, you know, operating in, you know, Wichita, Kansas. I mean, you have just very different in terms of, you know, operational, you know, behavior. Same thing is true, right? We operate in Israel, we operate in Finland. It's very different in terms of, you know, how we operate. The core is consumers want convenience, merchants want more sales, couriers want flexible earnings. I think that core fundamental principle has not changed.
When we look at that and we say, "Hey, let's apply the same playbook, let's apply the same operational excellence to all of the countries that we operate in," the end results are retention continues to improve, order frequency continues to improve. The core in this is where we started, right? The fundamental principle for us, it always goes back to having a better product. This entire business works on two things. It's product and math, right? If you're focused on building a great experience, not just for the consumer, for the merchant as well as Dasher, that drives retention higher. That retention paired with operational excellence and data and analytics ultimately drives the results that you're seeing in the business.
Thinking about new verticals in international markets, I can definitely see a world in which alcohol would do quite well in the U.K.
Absolutely.
but it's, how do you think about those adjacencies and the expansion there?
Sure. I mean, similar to what we're seeing in the U.S., I mean, new verticals I think is a newer category even in the international business. They're all growing. In fact, in some of the countries, because there is no traditional organized e-commerce such as on Amazon.com, people rely on Wolt for many of their, you know, non-restaurant purchases as well. So when I look at the penetration, which is, you know, volume in those countries that goes through grocery and, you know, non-restaurants, compared to the overall volume, some of the percentages are actually higher than what we are seeing in the U.S.. Overall, when I think about the expansion of categories and the opportunity available, it feels similar to the U.S. and in some cases, you know, might be even better.
Great. Shifting to commerce. You have ramped the commerce platform over the past year. You have just announced the acquisition of SevenRooms. Can you talk a little bit about the broader strategy, merchant enablement, and the rationale for this deal and how you expect to see that monetized over time?
Sure. A bunch of questions in there. Let me start with the overall strategy, right? When we started DoorDash, the fundamental thesis for us is we want to be a merchant services company. We want to help, you know, both grow as well as empower merchants. The grow portion was where we started, which is our demand generation marketplace. That was the first product which we started. The empower is we looked at merchants and said, "Hey, how can we help merchants even more? What are the services we can provide to merchants?" We started with logistics, as I talked about. Then we added our, you know, Storefront business. SevenRooms is basically an extension of that strategy. What we were looking for is how do you help merchants manage their tables better? How do you help drive operational efficiency?
Plus, at the same time, how do you help merchants drive more sales and marketing in a closed-loop system to consumers? SevenRooms gave us an opportunity where we said, "You can market to consumers, you can get to know your guests better, you can bring them back to the restaurant more often." That software platform, combined with the distribution network that we have, where we have more than, you know, 500,000 restaurants, we have an established sales force, so we can sell into the existing base. That was the powerful combination that, you know, we were attracted by.
Right. Makes sense. So advertising, some stats from Q4. So more than 1,000 SMB restaurants, 83 of the top 100 restaurants in the U.S., and 21 of the top 25 CPG marketers in the U.S., all advertised on Dash Marketplace. So thinking about those buckets, how do you think about the biggest opportunity and where are you pushing hardest in advertising at the moment?
Sure. You know, we think of it almost completely opposite. We think of it from a merchant perspective. We are not trying to think of it from our perspective. We're not trying to solve for, you know, sort of like a financial metric. You know, ultimately what we want to provide is, you know, our advertising business, our merchant-funded promotions business is just another part of our, you know, business-to-business services that we provide to merchants. Today, merchants spend, you know, somewhere between 7-10% of their sales on, you know, advertising, but they do not really have sort of like an analytical way to spend those dollars. We think our solution can give them the analytics behind how to spend their dollars, drive a higher return on advertising spend.
For us, as long as the return on advertising spend is in a superior spot, we feel comfortable continuing to extend and grow our advertising business. Just to give you a sense of where we are, right? Today, the majority of the ad business, the revenue comes from restaurants, that too in the U.S.. Very early on the international side, very early from a CPG perspective, and that largely reflects the size of the business that we have, the underlying GOV that we have.
Great. Thinking about long-term ad penetration, is there anything structurally different for you versus your peers, and where do you think that can go over time?
In terms of like financial?
just in terms of where the advertising penetration is, whether you think about it in terms of GOV, gross bookings, as it's been a metric for some of the food delivery space.
Sure.
Is there anything structurally different? Maybe we think about different verticals, restaurants versus grocery.
Right. Yeah, I often find it weird when, you know, peers or, you know, other companies come out and say, "Hey, here's the, you know, long-term target for, you know, ad as a percentage of GOV." Because to me, I'm like, the merchant is not thinking of it that way. The merchant is saying, "Hey, just give me a better product, which helps me drive, you know, more sales to, you know, the merchant." As long as that happens, right, whether it's in store or whether it's, you know, online, I think we can continue to scale that business. When I look at the business, I mean, I think of it in terms of a couple of different angles, right? Is there anything technologically that is impeding us to growing the business? No. Is there demand on the platform? Absolutely.
Is the retention of existing merchants on the ad platform continues to be good? Great. As long as those conditions exist and the constraints being consumer conversion is not impacted and return on advertising spend is good, we feel pretty good. We are always going to be very disciplined about growing that business because we do not want to get to a point where either conversion or ROAS gets impacted. What you will see from us is provide great product to the merchant, but be very disciplined about scaling that business.
Great. Thinking about financials, capital allocation. So gross margin, you've seen a little bit of a tailwind from the insurance over the past few quarters. How are you thinking about that going forward?
Sure. Yeah, we've done a ton of work around insurance over the last couple of years. You know, I'm pretty happy with where it is. I think we've driven a ton of leverage on the insurance line. As I think about it from a percentage of GOV basis, I would expect, you know, insurance to roughly be sort of where it is today.
Okay. And then capital allocation, you've just allocated a significant portion to M&A. How should you think about the buyback, and the free cash flow generation from here? And maybe on that point, if you can talk a little bit about cash balance and minimum levels you might like to maintain.
Sure. I mean, again, roughly, I think I answered this on the, you know, call as well. Minimum working capital needed to operate the business is roughly about $1 billion. So anything above that, we've always said, as long as it meets, you know, sort of our IRR threshold and framework, we are happy to invest, whether it's back in the business or share buyback or inorganic. I think the fundamental rule, you know, has not changed, right? For us, the core strategy of capital allocation continues to be we are going to invest as long as there is a good long-term IRR as well as long-term, you know, free cash flow that we think that generates, you know, from the investment. The business is cash flow generative. We have a healthy amount of cash.
As I think about it from a share buyback perspective, again, you know, we are always going to be opportunistic about it. We might be constrained in the short term, but as we think about it longer term, right, like our view on philosophy and buyback has not changed. As long as it presents a good opportunity for us from an IRR perspective, we are happy to do that.
Given that we've spoken about the five different priorities, key focus areas, how are you thinking about different areas that are most exciting at the moment from a capital allocation standpoint? Is there anything that really stands out to you?
I mean, again, I mean, I think, you know, we continue to find good opportunities, right? Restaurants is the largest, you know, the most mature business that we have. But still, I mean, we find great opportunities to continue to invest, right? Like we still do not have all the selection that we want on the platform. We continue to invest behind product. We continue to invest behind DashPass. Again, as we think about investment, right, like I think there is still a lot of opportunity for us to grow users and order frequency on the marketplace side, as well as when you think about it from a B2B commerce platform perspective, I think there is still a lot of opportunity for us to scale the existing services and continue to add new services as well.
Maybe the point that you mentioned on DashPass, is there anything different there that is different that you've seen in international markets so far? How is, how are some of the learnings that you've picked up in the U.S., like how can you take that into the U.K., broader Europe?
Sure. In the U.S., DashPass continues to do extremely well. In fact, when I look at the growth rate of DashPass in Q1, it accelerated slightly from Q4. The core reason being the product continues to get better, right? Like you have more categories, you have more, you know, sort of opportunity, more benefits that we have created on the platform. Overall, DashPass continues to be very strong. Retention on the platform is, you know, strong. The order frequency is obviously higher than people who are not subscribers. In the European markets, it's behind in terms of launch because we launched, you know, our Wolt Plus business roughly about two years ago. When I look at the slope of the curve in terms of adoption, the slope of the curve is higher in some of the European markets compared to even in the U.S.
Part of it is because we have all these learnings from the U.S. that we've been able to transport and help, you know, our Wolt team actually avoid some of the mistakes that we made as we started the DashPass business many years ago.
Great. It's a tech conference, so we've not spoken about AI yet.
That's true. AI or autonomy, you haven't asked, you know.
Exactly.
So.
We'll touch both of those. So, AI, how are you guys leveraging it internally? There have been a few examples from presentations I've sat in today where companies have spoken about driving efficiency improvements.
Sure.
Across the internal product. We had Laurie Beer speak at the start of the day, talking about 20-30% efficiency gains that our own developers at J.P. Morgan are starting to drive. How are you guys thinking about that?
Yeah, very similar, right? Like, I mean, again, I think we have, you know, more than a dozen experiments, you know, maybe even more internally within the company. And I think of it in terms of like three broad buckets, right? Like, you know, on the far right, you have internal sort of like areas, whether it's, you know, analysts writing SQL queries to get data. A lot of that, you know, starting to get replaced by some of the AI tools, developers writing code, you know, just like some of the other companies. We're starting to see, you know, efficiency gains there where, you know, automated code generation is happening. In the middle, you have the classic use case around support, where a lot of the workflows, you know, sort of like you have the contextual workflows that are being generated by some of the AI tools.
On the consumer side, you have personalization, which is like, hey, if you share, you know, your account with somebody else or if you and your significant other have, you know, the app, it should look very different based on your preferences, based on your order history. We are starting to see that drive conversion impact as well.
Okay. Great. Autonomous.
Sure.
It's obviously touching more of the ride-hailing market at the moment than it is restaurant. You guys have touched on some of the investments you're making on a number of earnings calls. Maybe you can dig into that a little bit and how you're thinking about the evolution of that tech.
Sure. I mean, you know, we've been working on it for a few years. I mean, nothing major to announce, but we think there's a real opportunity for us where a certain portion of the deliveries can be autonomous. We think of it in terms of two forms, right? Both by land as well as by air. I think we made, you know, a good amount of progress. We feel good about, you know, where this is headed. We've been very disciplined, you know, sort of about our investments in that area. Overall, we think the technology is pretty promising and what we need is very different from, you know, sort of like ride-sharing. It's a different form factor. It's, you know, lower in terms of overall cost.
We think there's a good opportunity there where it could be unit economic, you know, beneficial for us in the long run.
Regulation, it's a moving target in lots of different jurisdictions, both in the U.S. and internationally. Is there anything that stands out at the moment that we should be talking about?
Nothing really has changed. I mean, you know, I think, you know, even, you know, almost since the IPO, I mean, I think it's the same sort of like few things that have happened, but nothing major to talk about. I think it feels like it's in a pretty good spot right now.
Great. We have about a minute left, but as you're thinking out over the course of the balance of this year, the next few years, is there anything that is particularly exciting that you're focused on at the moment?
Sure. I mean, you know, just, you know, if you just take a step back and look at the journey of the business, right? I mean, the core business continues to do really well. You have a business that's continuing to grow. We've been through a variety of different demand cycles and the business has been very resilient. The overall profit dollar production of the business continues to increase. We're the only company to have gained share in restaurants. We are the largest in the U.S.. New verticals. We feel like we've made a lot of progress over the last, you know, three or four years after, you know, sort of like a build cycle, you know, several years back. We're going to be number one in terms of order volume share. You're starting to see us drive majority of the growth in that industry now.
Our international business continues to do well, where that business is, you know, gross profit positive. I think, you know, the two sort of announcements that we made, both Deliveroo and, you know, SevenRooms, I think it's a combination of a couple of things, right? We feel good about the core business. Both of these give opportunity for us to expand the surface area, to invest more, ultimately to drive more profit dollar production. At the same time, we feel like, you know, we have the capacity and the bandwidth to be able to do that, just given that, you know, the existing business continues to scale as well as grow quite nicely.
It's a great place to leave it. Ravi, thank you very much.
Thank you so much for having me.