The problem
Kuwait had restaurants people loved and customers who wanted food at home, but the two sides could not meet: good kitchens had no riders of their own, and the marketplaces of the time only forwarded orders without solving delivery.
How it works
Carriage ran an app where customers placed orders with restaurant partners, then dispatched its own in-house fleet to collect the food and deliver it — owning both the order and the last mile instead of leaving fulfilment to the restaurant.
Pain points
Restaurants watched demand they could not serve for lack of delivery capacity; customers could not reliably get food from local spots that had never offered delivery.
Business model
Commission per order plus delivery fees, with the economics carried by a dedicated rider fleet across Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar.
Challenges
Running an owned fleet across five Gulf markets plus a brief Egypt launch (shut down five months after opening) was operationally heavy; after Delivery Hero bought the company, Carriage was gradually absorbed into Talabat and its standalone workforce was largely laid off.
Funding
- Raised: $1.3M seed from the founding team (MENAbytes, May 2017).
- Acquired: by Delivery Hero in May 2017 for $100M (MENAbytes, Jan 2019).
Latest — January 2019
In January 2019 Delivery Hero confirmed it was consolidating its Gulf operations under Talabat: Carriage’s restaurant partners and operations across the region would migrate to Talabat’s backend, with Carriage continuing only as a consumer brand during the transition.