DoorDash's Record Quarter, Hidden Inside a $5B Day

I was three sips into a flat white at the coffee shop next to my apartment this morning when my phone did the thing — three pings, all DoorDash, all within ninety seconds. SevenRooms. Deliveroo. And then, almost as an afterthought, the Q1 2025 financial release. Every trade desk I follow led with the deals. The Q1 print got two paragraphs at the bottom, if it got a paragraph at all.

That’s the wrong order. The acquisitions are the louder story. The Q1 numbers are the one that explains why DoorDash could even write the checks — and why neither deal is the stretch the headlines made it sound like.

My read: the operating business has quietly become a cash-generation machine, and the M&A was funded out of operations, not a stretch raise. That changes how you read everything else announced today.

The numbers the deal coverage missed

The SEC-filed press release is worth pulling up on a second monitor. The line items, in the order they actually matter:

• Revenue: $3.0 billion, up 21% year over year. That’s a beat against a comp that already had DoorDash growing faster than every food-delivery peer in North America. Twenty-one percent at this scale is not a normal number.
• Orders: 732 million, up 18%. The order count tells you the platform is still adding frequency, not just price. If revenue had outpaced orders by a wider margin, I’d be circling “take rate” in red marker. It didn’t. The mix is healthy.
• Marketplace GOV: $23.1 billion, up 20%. Gross order value tracking with revenue confirms the take rate held. No quiet squeeze on restaurants funding the top line.
• Net income: $193 million, against a $(23) million loss in the year-ago quarter. This is the line that should have been the lede. DoorDash flipped from a GAAP loss to nearly $200M of GAAP profit in twelve months at a 21% growth rate. That combination — growth and GAAP profitability accelerating together — is the one almost nobody on the operator side believed was coming this fast.
• Adjusted EBITDA: $590 million, up 59%. EBITDA grew almost three times as fast as revenue. That’s operating leverage doing what operating leverage is supposed to do.
• Free cash flow: $494 million. In a single quarter. Annualize it crudely and you’re staring at roughly $2 billion of FCF run-rate before any synergies from the deals announced today.

The deal coverage is going to spend the rest of the week on enterprise value, multiples paid, and whether SevenRooms or Deliveroo was the better fit. Fine. But before any of that math means anything, the question is whether the acquirer can carry the deals. Q1 says yes, twice.

Why $590M of EBITDA is the structural number

It’s tempting to fixate on the net income flip because it’s the cleanest before/after. I’d argue the $590M of adjusted EBITDA, growing 59%, is the more important number — and the one that funded the M&A decision.

EBITDA at that scale gives DoorDash three things the deal headlines underplayed. First, cash: $494M of FCF in a quarter means SevenRooms doesn’t require a balance-sheet stretch. Second, rating-agency cover for any debt component. Third, and most importantly for operators reading this, runway to absorb integration costs without raising take rates to fund them.

My read: that last point is the one that should matter to restaurants. The fear with consolidation in this stack — a marketplace acquiring a reservations and CRM business — is that the acquirer pays for the deal by widening the spread on restaurants. DoorDash’s Q1 says they don’t have to. Whether they choose not to is a different question, and we’ll know more on the Q2 call.

The 59% growth on a $590M base also tells you operating leverage isn’t tapping out. Orders +18%, revenue +21%, EBITDA +59%. Each layer compounds on the one underneath.

What to watch on the Q2 print

Three things on my list for the next ninety days:

• Take-rate discipline. Q1 GOV grew 20% and revenue grew 21%. If that gap widens in Q2 with SevenRooms and Deliveroo consolidating in, the integration-funded-by-restaurants thesis comes back on the table.
• FCF conversion through the deals. Q2 will include deal-related outflows and one-time items. Watch the adjusted figure with deal items stripped, and whether the conversion rate from EBITDA held.
• Order frequency on the merged base. The strategic case for a reservations and CRM business on top of marketplace orders is cross-platform frequency. If DoorDash starts disclosing cohort frequency on dual-product users — and they should — that’s where the synergy story stops being a slide.

I’d also watch the regulatory side. We sketched the gig-worker landscape in our later coverage of regulatory tailwinds and headwinds, and any meaningful policy move in California, New York, or the U.K. lands directly on these Q1-style margins.

For today, though, the read is simpler than the deal coverage made it. DoorDash posted a record quarter. The M&A wasn’t funded by hope. It was funded by $590M of EBITDA and $494M of free cash flow, generated in ninety days. Everything else announced today — what SevenRooms costs operators, what Deliveroo does to the European competitive map — has to be read against that backdrop.

The deals are louder. The quarter is the reason the deals exist.

— Maya covers restaurant tech. Tips: [email protected].