I'm always a little suspicious of the reality of unicorns.
The way that the figure is derived is that people paid $X for portion Y of the company, and therefore the company is worth $X/Y. The problem is that in addition to portion Y, in a large deal the investors also get preferred stock, downside protections, and so on. Those extras are worth something, and therefore some of $Y is for THAT rather than a share in the company.
Therefore the company is always worth less than the figure you see reported.
I'm pretty sure the founders got extremely diluted after their two most recent rounds.
Unfortunately start-ups in emergent markets have very little leverage to negotiate reasonable terms, especially when there are just a few institutional investors willing to bet on these markets.
Also since these businesses require so much capital and have burn rates that grow exponentially there's little room for negotiation. Unless you want to wait and see how Uber eats your lunch.
Reminds me of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17779751 about DoorDash which was false. Given some of the same investors are in Rappi, I would not immediately assume they have funky terms.
First of all DoorDash and Rappi are not comparable, as much as they provide the same type of service.
If you're rapidly growing company in South America trying to raise money from American/Asian investors, you're already in disadvantage.
You could totally get competing term-sheets for a company raising money to operate in these markets but nobody is dropping their pants to give money to these companies when they could be easily pouring money into safer markets. These are companies raising unprecedented rounds for markets in which the delivery fees are in their majority under 1 USD. As they keep expanding and growing their business they will have to shave a lot of profitability, while dealing with the unpredictable economic nature of these countries (for example Argentina, one of their markets, is currently going through an economic crisis - their currency is basically worthless, bank rates at 60%, inflation expected to be at 26% this year...not
a great time to pay for food delivery)
I'm not saying that these investors are sharks and just being predatory for the sake of being pieces of shits. What I'm saying is that given the market, the opportunity, the risks, the environment and the competitive landscape is very unlikely that they are leaving these deals without severely affecting the common stockholder pool.
These investors have the fiduciary responsibility of getting the most out of their funds and I really don't see why they would give 200MM USD to a company that operates in emergent economies without getting a huge chunk of ownership.
The way that the figure is derived is that people paid $X for portion Y of the company, and therefore the company is worth $X/Y. The problem is that in addition to portion Y, in a large deal the investors also get preferred stock, downside protections, and so on. Those extras are worth something, and therefore some of $Y is for THAT rather than a share in the company.
Therefore the company is always worth less than the figure you see reported.
See https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/The-Terms-Behind-Th... for more on this.