Uber Kills Off Drizly Alcohol Delivery Service

Drizly, the alcohol startup with a troubled history, is coming to an end as Uber decides to kill off the business for good....
Uber Kills Off Drizly Alcohol Delivery Service
Written by Matt Milano
  • Drizly, the alcohol startup with a troubled history, is coming to an end as Uber decides to kill off the business for good.

    Uber purchased Drizly in 2021 for $1.1 billion. It seems, after a little more than three years owning the startup, Uber has decided it’s had enough and is killing it off.

    “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,” Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Uber’s SVP of delivery, told Axios in an exclusive interview.

    “We’re grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the BevAlc delivery category as the original industry pioneer,” he added.

    Drizly has had a troubled history that has seen it run afoul of the US government. In 2022, the Federal Trade Commission fined Drizly and CEO James Cory Rellas for a data breach that occurred as a result of the company’s negligence. Drizly had a cybersecurity incident in 2018, but failed to do anything to fix the vulnerability, leading to a much larger breach two years later.

    “Our proposed order against Drizly not only restricts what the company can retain and collect going forward but also ensures the CEO faces consequences for the company’s carelessness,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, at the time. “CEOs who take shortcuts on security should take note.”

    It’s unclear if the cybersecurity issues played a role in Uber’s decision, but it’s certainly difficult to imagine it didn’t play a part.

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