DoorDash Q2 2026 Earnings Report

DoorDash EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $0.46
• Consensus EPS: $0.47
• Beat/Miss: Missed by -$0.01
• One Year Ago EPS: $0.65

DoorDash Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $4.45 billion
• Expected Revenue: $4.34 billion
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$114.41 million
• YoY Revenue Growth: +35.60%

DoorDash Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q2 2026
• Date: 8/5/2026
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Wednesday, August 5, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 4:30PM ET

DoorDash (NASDAQ:DASH) operates a technology-driven logistics and food-delivery marketplace that connects consumers, merchants and independent delivery contractors. The company’s core service enables customers to order from local restaurants and retailers through its app and website while DoorDash handles last-mile fulfillment via its network of drivers, known as “Dashers.” Over time the platform has broadened beyond restaurant deliveries to include groceries, convenience items and retail deliveries, positioning DoorDash as a broader on-demand logistics provider for consumer goods.

In addition to its marketplace, DoorDash offers a suite of products and services for consumers and businesses. Consumer offerings include subscription services such as DashPass and branded storefronts like DashMart for on-demand convenience and grocery items. For business customers, DoorDash provides enterprise logistics and white-label delivery solutions through DoorDash Drive, tools for merchants to manage orders, and advertising services intended to help partner merchants increase visibility on the platform.

Founded in 2013 by Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang and Evan Moore while they were at Stanford, DoorDash is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company completed its initial public offering in December 2020 and has since expanded operations beyond the United States into markets including Canada and Australia. Its business model emphasizes scalable last-mile logistics and partnerships with a broad mix of independent restaurants, national chains and retail merchants.

Tony Xu, a co-founder, serves as DoorDash’s chief executive, and the company’s leadership has prioritized investments in logistics technology, merchant services and diversification of delivery categories. DoorDash continues to evolve its product offerings and merchant integrations to capture a wider set of on-demand commerce use cases.

DoorDash Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Demand remained strong across the marketplace. Restaurant growth accelerated, DashPass subscriber additions were among the strongest in recent years, and newer verticals benefited from higher user engagement, order frequency, and basket sizes.
• Positive Sentiment: Profitability exceeded expectations in Q2. Management cited better-than-expected unit economics, advertising and subtotal performance, and a contribution-profit-positive Deliveroo; it expects Q3 adjusted EBITDA to land within its previously issued range while continuing to reinvest in growth.
• Positive Sentiment: Grocery and fulfillment services showed improving economics. New verticals are on track to become gross-profit positive in the second half of 2026, while DashMart fulfillment services generated incremental demand and reportedly delivered roughly 10-times better error rates by controlling inventory.
• Positive Sentiment: International performance continued to accelerate. Deliveroo and Wolt are gaining share in key markets, with improving volume, subscription growth, and unit economics; management expects additional benefits as the global technology stack is unified beginning next year.
• Neutral Sentiment: DoorDash is investing heavily in AI, autonomous delivery, and technology infrastructure. Early applications are improving discovery, merchant onboarding, routing, and customer support, while autonomous delivery has reached meaningful scale in Phoenix, but management emphasized that broader rollout will depend on solving substantial operational and regulatory challenges.

Presentation

[Operator]

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the DoorDash Q2 2026 Earnings Call. After today's opening statement, we will host a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the call over to Wes Twigg. Please go ahead.

[Weston Twigg, VP of Investor Relations at DoorDash]

Thanks, Connor. Good afternoon, everyone, thanks for joining us for our Q2 2026 Earnings Call. I'm pleased to be joined today by Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO, Tony Xu, and CFO, Ravi Inukonda. We'll be making forward-looking statements during today's call, including, without limitation, our expectations for our business, financial position, operating performance, profitability, our guidance, strategies, capital allocation approach, and broader economic environment. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Many of these uncertainties are described in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events or performance. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures.

[Weston Twigg, VP of Investor Relations at DoorDash]

Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, may be found in our earnings release, which is available on our investor relations website at ir.doordash.com. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results and are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Finally, this call is being audio webcasted on our investor relations website. An audio replay of the call will be available on our website shortly after the call ends. Operator, I'll pass it back to you, and you can take our first question.

[Operator]

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to one question. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We also ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question, and if you're muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. The first question comes from Michael Morton of MoffettNathanson. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Michael Morton, Analyst at MoffettNathanson]

Good evening, guys. Thank you for the question. I wanted to ask about the grocery business, as you've talked about improving the unit economics. From our understanding, there are some grocers on the platforms, your platform specifically, who are paying effectively zero or very low take rates. They came on looking to see if you could drive demand and how well they could work with DoorDash. I was wondering if that's the case, what the opportunity is to reprice these relationships going forward, maybe pushing some of the affordability burden that's landing on DoorDash right now back to the grocers. Thank you.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Yeah. Hey, Michael. It's Tony. I can start, and feel free to chime in, Ravi. We see extremely strong performance in our grocery business. It's the fastest-growing part of our marketplace business, and we have very healthy relationships with all of the partners on the platform. In terms of the economic relationships, I'm not going to really comment about any one in particular. When you are the fastest grower in the market for them, and you are their source of growth, put a different way, we might be 100% of the growth that they see in terms of their actual business. You certainly have opportunities to grow your business with them as well as improve your relationships with them.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

If you look at our business as a whole, one of the things you see from this quarter, and frankly, many of the time periods leading up to now, is that there are many sources of improving economics. We have improving unit economics across all of our categories. You have improving unit economics in our restaurants business, too. You have improving unit economics in our different geographies in which we operate. You have increasing adoption of our DashPass program, as well as accelerating growth in our ads business. When you add all of that in, we have a business in which there are many levers in which we can control the kind of financial profile in order to make great investments. Ultimately, we're here always seeking the next best investment.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

It doesn't mean that we always make those investments, when we see the opportunity, we're always leaning in. That includes all of the work that we're doing in grocery, which we think there's a long runway, as well as all the other opportunities in front of us.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Mike, just to add, look, if you take a step back and think about our overall grocery business as well as new verticals, we talked about the fact that we became order volume share leaders in Q4. We've continued to extend that lead to, when you look at the underlying growth in MAUs, which is the number of users that use categories outside of restaurants, that number is growing, order frequency is growing. We talked about the fact in the letter that basket sizes are growing. If you look at our historic cohorts, consumers are using us for more use cases, which is driving overall basket sizes higher. Last call, I think I mentioned the fact that we expect our overall new verticals business to be gross profit positive. We are on track for that in the second half of the year.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Look, when we think about the business as a whole, we think about retention, order frequency, as well as underlying improvement in unit economics, and they're all headed in the right direction for us.

[Operator]

The next question is from Mark Mahaney from Evercore ISI. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Mark Mahaney, Analyst at Evercore ISI]

Thanks. I'll ask you a question about Deliveroo. You've had now three quarters in a row of kind of accelerating growth, I think, in orders, yes, and in GOV, and then I think in revenue. Just peel that back a little bit. How many different opportunities you've had, what you've been able to pull, what you've been able to change in order to deliver that better performance, and it's a little hard to tell, but is it also showing up on the bottom line? Have you been finding ways to improve the profitability of Deliveroo as well? Thank you very much.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Hey, it's Tony. I can start. What I would say on Deliveroo is it really is a story that probably started way back in 2021, when we first made our first large acquisition overseas, which was with Wolt. We've learned a ton, obviously, about building our own U.S. business. We've learned a lot in terms of how Wolt has operated in different geographies across Europe, as well as how to integrate the lessons that we've learned, as well as the lessons that maybe don't apply into each one of these local geographies. What you're seeing in Deliveroo, I agree with you, Mark, is just accelerating performance, frankly, across the board.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

That's super exciting because I think, A, it's validation that our integration work is really working, and that the lessons that we've learned in building these marketplace businesses around the world do translate into some of these very meaningful geographies and foundational places where we're just seeing growth in all of our big international markets. This doesn't even include the majority of benefits that we expect to see once we actually finish all of our work on building a single tech stack. As that work kind of comes more fully online toward the beginning of next year, we expect to see even more benefits as time goes on.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Mark, just to put a finer point, right? When you look at the actual performance of Deliveroo itself, to your point, volume growth or MAU growth or subscription growth, actually, when you look at it on a year-over-year basis, has been the highest that we've seen in the last couple of years. At the same point, to your second part of your question, we've increased the unit economics as well, but the way in which we are operating the business is very similar, right? Finding great opportunities to drive investments back in selection, quality, subscription is a big area of focus for us. We're going to continue to invest back in the business, and my expectation is we'll continue to drive higher top line as well as meet the profitability targets that we set out in the last letter.

[Operator]

The next question is from Nikhil Devnani of Bernstein. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Nikhil Devnani, Analyst at Bernstein]

Hi, thanks for taking my question. I'll stick with the theme of international. I guess broadly, there's a common perception that international might be lower quality growth because maybe you're not number one everywhere, or maybe the competitive set now is better funded and more consolidated today. I would love your perspective on that overall sentiment and really how you structurally see the longer-term earnings power or quality of growth out of these international markets relative to the domestic business. How important is it to have a pure market share number versus more minimum viable scale in these jurisdictions that allow you to then operate well? Thank you.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Yeah. Hey, Nikhil, it's Tony. I can start. I think there are a couple of different questions that you're asking. The first is really what do we see happening internationally? Our aspiration is to be the global leader in local commerce. We think we are best positioned to do that given that we bring the deepest and the broadest portfolio of products in order to serve those audiences. Like you said, it's a game that is played locally. There are no global network effects in these kinds of businesses. One of the points you raise is the right one, where sometimes there isn't an obvious tie between the market position and kind of your economic profile. That's because it is a minimum viable scale business.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

That said, though, when I actually look at our current execution, the vast majority of our international business is concentrated in our top 10 markets outside of the U.S. In those markets, we are the leader, or we are a very strong number two, and we're gaining share in all of the markets. Some of these markets include places like the U.K., Italy, Germany, the Nordics, Israel, Canada. I can keep going. We like kind of what we see, and it kind of really is a follow-on to the previous question where Ravi was talking about how we're making improvements fundamentally to the actual core propositions to all the audiences. We're offering wider selection, better prices, better quality of delivery in terms of reliability, accuracy, and speed, and we're improving our customer service.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Whenever I see that, and I also see the opportunity for the runway to bring our portfolio of B2B products, which have done really well in the U.S. but even have more opportunity outside of the U.S., just given the more nascent development of digital technologies in the restaurant and retail categories overseas, I just think the potential is very, very big.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Nikhil, the results are pretty clear, right? We've talked about the fact that on Deliveroo side, the growth is accelerating. In fact, when you look at the underlying cohorts, the growth is some of the highest that we've seen over the last couple of years. Even outside of that, when I look at the portfolio excluding Roo, we are growing, MAUs are growing, order frequency is growing. Wolt+, in fact, our subscription program in Wolt, had one of the best quarters, which is a record quarter in terms of overall paid subscriber growth. At the same point, it's not just purely about growth for us, right? We are improving the unit economics, not just across Roo, but across Wolt as well. When you look at whether it's gross profit or contribution, both of them have continued to improve on a year-over-year basis.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Operator, are you there? Can we take the next question?

[Operator]

Sorry, we were having some technical issues. The next question is from Deepak Mathivanan from Cantor Fitzgerald.

[Deepak Mathivanan, Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald]

Thanks for taking the question. Great. Thank you. Tony, last month, Andy Fang talked with Boris at Cloud about how DoorDash is aiming to translate AI spend into outcomes somewhat closer to the business metrics now, while also letting employees to experiment aggressively with AI tools. Can you talk about where you're seeing this attribution clearly now, and how we should broadly think about AI spend at DoorDash over the next 12-18 months? Maybe one for you, Ravi. U.S. restaurant GOV acceleration, can you expand on the drivers of the growth? I know weather was disruptive last quarter, but you also had factors like World Cup. Curious if you can talk a little bit more about the factors of acceleration in Q2. Thank you so much.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Yeah, sure. On the AI question, Deepak, I would say a couple of things. The first thing is we want to make sure that any technology that we meet, whether it's AI or frankly, anything else, that it's actually rooted in delivering a better customer experience. Because if it's not, I'm not exactly sure what problem we're actually trying to solve, and I don't think it makes sense to just play with the technology for the technology's sake. When you look at some of the things that we've seen success, for example, one of the more recent products we launched, was called Ask DoorDash, which is an ordering agent that helps customers discover restaurants that are similar to ones that they've ordered in the past, but that are new to them, that helps them build a grocery cart in under two minutes.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Really solving actual pain points that we see in using an increasingly larger and more diversified marketplace. That's one example. On the merchant side, we've seen automation in building catalogs for retailers or menus for restaurants, which includes all of the photos, the metadata around all of the different SKUs and items so that we can actually onboard a merchant faster in order to get same store sales growth. For Dashers, we're seeing improvements in routing as well as how we can help Dashers find the best areas to dash. Those are some examples of how we actually have applied AI in a way that is actually meaningful in terms of driving customer outcomes, which ultimately deliver business results.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

The other thing that we've done is, kind of with all things at DoorDash, we care as much about how we do it in order to be efficient, as we do about allowing some degree of inefficiency towards invention. We've built a lot of tools like DoorDash Bench and other systems internally that allow us to model the appropriate tools, and give those tools to be used for the right level of token spend or intelligence required. I think those are some of the things in which we found ourselves. That's kind of our approach in terms of how we've applied it towards AI or frankly, any technology. It's why we're excited to keep going and lean in a way that I think is disciplined on the one hand, but on the other hand, allows us to bring real customer benefits.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Hey, Deepak, on your second question around restaurant growth. Restaurant growth was quite strong in the quarter, if you look at it. In fact, growth accelerated from Q1 to Q2. A lot of the growth is coming from just increase in DashPass subscribers. A couple of points, right? We wrote in the letter as well. We added more number of DashPass subscribers in the last year compared to the two prior years. Number 2, when I look at the paid subscriber growth in DashPass, it was one of the highest that we've seen in the last couple of years. A lot of that is the underlying product continuing to get better. A lot of that is the increased investment that we made in selection as well as quality. In fact, if you look at mature cohorts, they're continuing to engage higher than what we've seen before.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

New consumers continue to be quite strong as well. Ultimately, all of this is driving the growth that you're seeing in restaurants. What I would also say is, if you think about Q2 of last year, it was unusually strong for us. Comping against what was a strong Q2 of last year and still putting up the strong numbers in Q2, that's a true testament to, A, the demand that we're seeing in the business, as well as the underlying improvements in product.

[Operator]

The next question is from Dominic Ball of Rothschild & Co Redburn. Your line is now open.

[Dominic Ball, Analyst at Rothschild & Co Redburn]

Hey, guys.

[Operator]

Please go ahead.

[Dominic Ball, Analyst at Rothschild & Co Redburn]

Hi, guys. Yeah, hey. Thank you for the question. Interesting commentary about kind of investing more in merchant services and software. I think it's somewhat Well known that DoorDash has been testing its POS product in a few markets in the U.S. with both SMBs and enterprise restaurants. We'd just love to know about how these test trials are going, what products and features are kind of resonating, what is kind of driving some restaurants maybe choosing to use DoorDash here? How do we think about a potential more broader commercial launch going forward? Thanks, guys.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Our vision is to be the best partner to every local business. That probably is pretty clear from the mission since day one. The way we do this is that we want to give every business the same tools that we built for ourselves so that they can grow their digital business. If you think about what that looks like, we kind of play in this ecosystem where we have at least three offerings today, right? We have our marketplace, we have tools to help build the digital businesses of restaurants and retailers. In fact, that business serves over 150,000 businesses and has grown 40% year-over-year in the quarter. More recently, we've introduced products that actually drive customers inside the store. Some of these products include Going Out as well as Reservations.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

On the business side, it includes SevenRooms, which is a company that we acquired about a year ago. When I think about what this ecosystem allows us to do, it allows us to help customers build their relationships with the local businesses, and ideally forge regulars for each one of these local businesses. The reason why we can do this is because we have the biggest scale as well as the deepest customer data sets to allow us to actually drive this engagement. For example, a customer may start by ordering delivery from the DoorDash app, and then perhaps they sign up for a loyalty program on a merchant's first-party channel, something that we've built for them.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

When it makes sense, both DoorDash and the merchant can incentivize the customer to go inside the store or go inside the restaurant and actually have a meal. When you think about the interaction effects here, what we really are able to do is be the best growth partner for all these businesses. For consumers, give them the most choice in terms of how they actually want to interact with all these businesses. I think the proof points we kind of highlighted in our quarterly update are really, really strong, and we think that this ecosystem is one that has a very long runway.

[Operator]

The next question is from Jason Helfstein of Oppenheimer. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Jason Helfstein, Analyst at Oppenheimer]

Thanks. Just two questions. One, you talked a little bit about Dot deliveries in the release. I guess anything you want to share on how you're thinking about unit economics kind of like today versus where we think it goes long term and how you think that impacts demand around elasticity? Is it possible to share the AOV for the most recent period in the chart on page three, where you're comparing the restaurant versus the grocery and retail? Thanks.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Sure. Maybe I can start with the question on Dot, then Ravi feel free to chime in on the second question. I would say a few things about DoorDash Dot. The overall vision for autonomous delivery, at least at DoorDash, is that we want to offer AVs throughout the network so that we can deliver the best service to customers. The best service could be the fastest delivery, the most affordable delivery from the widest selection, including from very far away places. I would say that the real secret sauce or the magic that we've learned in building DoorDash Dot is that it's really the complexity of marrying the operations with the technology that actually allows you to even have a chance at delivering scaled autonomous delivery.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Put a different way, DoorDash Dot or any AV for that matter, alone will not make autonomous deliveries actually scale, certainly not at any level of meaningful penetration for customers. At the end of the day, you have to solve very challenging operational problems in the physical world. You have to solve the loading problem. At the merchant, you have to estimate merchant prep times in the case of restaurants or inventory levels in the case of retailers and grocery stores. You got to solve for difficult drop-off issues like perhaps a doorman inside of a high-rise building or a complicated gate entry in an apartment unit. These are all of the issues that we've encountered, and are candidly like maybe 1/1000th of the issues that we've encountered in building DoorDash Dot in our test markets.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

I think to get to the milestone that we have today with Dot, where we have meaningful scale in our test market, has been a huge accomplishment by the team, and it gives us confidence that you can actually truly scale autonomous delivery if you both can master the operations and the technology. That's why I think we're in the best position to do it, because we Run the network, and we are also building the technology ourselves, which gives us the lowest level of detailed understanding of how to actually make this happen. Doesn't mean that we have to build everything. We actually, whether it's by land or by air, we have a variety of partners that we interact with. For everyone, we kind of solve all of the challenging operational problems for them, and we do that through our autonomous delivery platform.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

For a merchant, you can take your existing DoorDash integration and you get access to any and all AVs. For customers, you're going to actually one day get the benefit of these technologies. With respect to the cost profile, we're very excited by what we see. It's exponential progress. I think that the first milestone for us has really been, can you actually commercialize this in a way that you've seen certain robotaxi providers like Waymo actually do it with rideshare? We've been able to now do it with delivery.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Hey, Jason, it's Ravi. On the second point, let me start with what we're seeing in the business. As we continue to operate and expand our new verticals in grocery business, what you're seeing is, as the product is getting better, the basket sizes are increasing. This is what we had originally expected, which is as we add more selection, as the quality of the product continues to get better, you'd have customers use us for more use cases, which will ultimately drive the basket sizes to be higher. We're seeing that in older cohorts, we're seeing that in newer cohorts, which is visible overall in the business as well. Let me actually take a step back and walk you through what our thesis was and why we put the second chart in the letter. Our core thesis was twofold.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

One is, we knew that as customers or consumers habituate on the platform, they will spend more with us. They'll spend more with us on the restaurants business, they'll adopt newer categories, they'll spend more with us on the new verticals business. The example that we took in that chart was one of our older cohorts, which is largely representative actually of the other cohorts that we see in the business, where consumer spend on restaurants is increasing, consumer spend on new verticals is increasing, and at the same time, DashPass penetration is increasing. If you think about it, this is almost like a self-reinforcing loop where the product gets better, consumers adopt and habituate to DashPass. As they adopt DashPass, they continue to use the product more, which ultimately leads to more growth as well as more profit dollars in the system.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

This has largely been the focus for us, and that's largely what you're seeing in the underlying cohort, and we're very pleased with the performance of that in the underlying business.

[Operator]

The next question is from Shweta Khajuria of Wolfe Research. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Shweta Khajuria, Analyst at Wolfe Research]

Thank you for taking my questions. Let me try two, please. First is on the DashMart fulfillment services. Since your launch and, since working with a handful of partners, I understand, what have you learned so far that you could potentially quantify or some sort of tangible learnings that you could share, whether it is on the magnitude of customer experience improvement, or something else? Then, what metrics do you look at to be able to make that decision to scale DashMart fulfillment services? Then the second question is just overall EBITDA growth, where now we are in the back half of this year and in the light of investments this year, but more importantly, as we think about balancing growth and, top-line growth and EBITDA growth.

[Shweta Khajuria, Analyst at Wolfe Research]

Ravi, how are you thinking about that as we think about the demand trends that you see right now and balancing growth with profitability? Thanks a lot.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Yeah. I can start by answering about DashMart fulfillment services. To state the obvious, we want every local business to be successful in their local communities. That's true in every category, from restaurants to grocery to retail. One of the things that we learned five years ago when we launched our grocery business, even though it's going so well and we're helping lots of grocers compete, is that there's this structural challenge with grocery delivery where grocers don't know their inventory. In some ways, it's almost impossible for a whole host of reasons, one of which is because consumers come in and they move things around. It's a very difficult proposition then to offer customers a use case where you're asking them to pay a premium for delivery, but they don't get exactly what they ordered.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Our solution to this is DashMart fulfillment services, where we are managing warehouses where we control the inventory and sell exactly what's in stock, so that we can actually offer near perfect accuracy, and give customers the selection that they want from any place inside the city, and also very, very quickly. In terms of what we've seen so far since our announcement last fall, and the launch that we've had with several partners, is we're seeing lots of incremental demand because these warehouses are running near 24/7. If you compare that to traditional store operating hours, that's a dramatic increase in TAM as well as really just solving the needs of customers because customers sometimes don't get freed up until maybe after store closing hours before they can think about the next day or planning their groceries or their shopping needs.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

We're seeing lots of incremental demand, and we're also seeing 10x better error rates because we're running the inventory. As a result, we're selling customers exactly The customers are getting exactly what they ordered, and we're selling them exactly what's actually in stock. All the signs right now are really positive For us to scale DoorDash fulfillment services. Look, this is complicated. This is building physical infrastructure. You're obviously adding technology to it by managing the inventory and obviously running the entire fulfillment. You can imagine a world in which these warehouses can power all of the needs inside of a city. What you can really do when you do something like that is you can really unlock the amount of selection available to customers.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Today, I would say DoorDash is delivering probably one-tenth in most cities, the available selection in terms of retail and grocery and the like. If we can actually build this capability and do it in concert with all of the great retail and grocery selection inside of a city, I think customers get the best product. They get all the selection that they want at perfect quality very quickly.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Sure that your second question around trying to balance both growth as well as profitability, right? You had asked about the demand trends. Look, when I look at the underlying business, the demand trends continue to be quite strong. As you know, we focus and spend a lot of our time on cohorts. MAUs, when I look across the board, they're at all-time highs. Subscription, I talked about the fact that both domestically, internationally, it was one of our best quarters in the sense that the subscription continues to be at record highs. Restaurant growth accelerated. Deliveroo continues to do quite well. Overall, when I look at the underlying improvements in the product, that's driving the improvements that you're seeing both from retention as well as order frequency. At the same point, look, the quarter was very strong from an underlying profitability perspective as well.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

A lot of that is because the underlying unit economics continue to improve. For us, the philosophy has always been the same, right? We're consistently trying to improve efficiency. There's many sources across the board, whether it's sales and marketing, fixed costs, up and down the P&L. Our goal is to consistently reinvest back in the business. Look, we talked about the fact that we're investing back into the business in building product, some of which we've talked about earlier on the call, whether it's autonomy, unification of the global tech stack, or investing back in merchant services. All of those are going well. They're all going on budget and on plan according to what I'd estimated a couple of quarters ago. These will increase the surface area. Ultimately, the goal for us is to continue to drive both growth as well as profit dollars.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

As long as we make the product better, what we're seeing in the business is we're able to do both, right? This is how we think about balancing both growth as well as profit dollar production in our business.

[Operator]

The next question is from Josh Beck of Raymond James. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Josh Beck, Analyst at Raymond James]

Thanks for taking the question. I had maybe a product-oriented question. On Dot getting to high single-digit within a market by the end of the year, could you give us maybe some characteristics? Is this because it's maybe more of a longer route, suburb type of market? If you were to maybe add in all of the different modalities between maybe sidewalk, pathway, drones, autonomous vehicles, is there some type of ceiling that you have in your mind in terms of maybe the percentage of orders that could be filled through autonomous? Then just secondarily on the AI assistant, obviously lots of attractive characteristics, discovery, basket, et cetera. I'm curious if there's been other observations with respect to better frequency of these customers. Curious on maybe what you have to say about ad monetization.

[Josh Beck, Analyst at Raymond James]

It seems like maybe time spent could be less, but conversion could be better. I'm just curious on those two topics. Thank you.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

All right. I think you had maybe seven or eight questions in there, Josh, I'll do my best. Look, on DoorDash Dot, it is a representative DoorDash market. We're testing in Phoenix, and we're testing it with real scale now, which is a real accomplishment when you think about these are not demos, these are not prototypes. There are no fixed routes. This is real life, and this is real life for tens of thousands of customers that are receiving real deliveries. That's very exciting. It's also very challenging. I mentioned maybe five or six issues that might be literally 1/1,000th the number of issues that you have to solve to actually have a chance at making autonomous deliveries actually happen. That's true whether you're doing it by land, it's also true whether you're doing it by air.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

We've seen this with DoorDash Air as well, in addition to all the partners that we test with and bring our scale to. What I would say is, what's going to determine the ceiling or the penetration of autonomous delivery is whether or not you can master both the operations and the technology. I believe we're best positioned to do that because we're actually doing both in-house. We are getting to the lowest level of detail, chopping down the very heavy wood of every issue that exists in the real world, that exists in every single restaurant, retailer, on the road. Dot travels road, sidewalk, and bike lane. It's the only vehicle in the world to do that autonomously. There's a lot of challenges when you actually try to take on that multimodality.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

One of the interesting things, perhaps the most interesting thing of what we're building with autonomy is this autonomous delivery platform. You can think of this as the brains that actually makes it all happen, that deciphers which vehicles go to which orders, that decides whether you have a mixed route, where you have human dashers as part of the legs of the journey and autonomous vehicles on other parts of the journey. That looks into the configuration of the package size and the package design and the package weight, and there's a lot of complexity. All of that gets reduced and kind of goes and disappears, because we kind of handle it through our autonomous delivery platform so that merchants get the same integration that they have with DoorDash today.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

They don't have to change a single thing about their workflow, and customers just get access to the benefits of autonomous delivery, which will be, in the future, speed, cost, and more selection. I think that's going to be really exciting. Again, it's really going to be the execution that determines the ceiling, and I think we're best suited for that execution. I think your second question on the AI assistant, the short answer is, of course. Whenever you're reducing friction in a product, you get more usage. If we're making it easier to build a grocery cart, you get more grocery carts, and you get bigger grocery carts. It doesn't change at all the ads profile or anything else. If anything, you actually get just more incremental orders and more incremental opportunities because people order more often.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

The same thing is true about ordering restaurants. If you now discover that there's something slightly healthier or faster or cheaper or just better or different from what you typically order, then you tend to order more often, possibly for more use cases. We eat 20 to 25 times a week, DoorDash only touches a fraction of that. That is really the runway we have. When I think about the number of meal occasions, and shopping needs on top of that, it's north of 100 per month. We have a lot of shots on goal that we can go capture, and if we just reduce the friction of actually ordering and then master and continue to master the operations of fulfillment, all of the metrics will go in the right direction.

[Operator]

The next question is from Youssef Squali of Truist Securities. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Youssef Squali, Analyst at Truist Securities]

Awesome. Thank you so much. Guys, I just want to double-click on the margin question again. Ravi, can you maybe just talk about the drivers for the material beats and adjusted EBITDA in Q2? It came quite a bit outside of the guidance range. More recently, you guys have been guiding too, at some point hit somewhere in the midpoint. This one is dramatically higher. Were there any investments that got pushed back into Q3 and then Q4? And are we still tracking to show higher year-on-year adjusted EBITDA margin for 2026, ex Deliveroo? Thank you.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Hey, Youssef. Yeah, let me take that. Look, at the highest level, what I would say is the core restaurants business continues to perform on all cylinders. Growth, like I said on Deepak's question, growth accelerated, unit economics continue to improve. New verticals growing much faster than our restaurants business, as well as we're on track to being gross profit positive by the end of the year. International continues to do well. We've talked about some of the strength that you're seeing in Deliveroo, as well as the beat on unit economics there. More specifically, what we saw in the quarter was the unit economic improvement came in ahead of our expectations, specifically in a couple of areas. Ads was one of them, subtotal was the other one, where in the second half of the quarter, those unit economics came in slightly ahead of what we had expected.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

In addition, Roo beat our own internal volume expectations. Roo is contribution profit positive. That led to some of the upside that you're seeing in the business. Look, more broadly, what I would say is our philosophy in how we operate the business, that is not changing. Look, it's a very tightly managed business. There's a lot of levers that we control up and down the P&L. What we're consistently trying to do is try to find sources of efficiency. Like I said earlier, there's many sources of efficiency that we work on, and take those and reinvest that back in the business. We're not trying to optimize the last dollar from one quarter to the next. Look, our focus has always been on how do you build a large, durable business over time while continuing to increase the overall profit dollar production.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

To your second point, look, our focus has always been on landing inside the range. If you're thinking about the second half from a modeling perspective, I would expect us to land inside the range of the guidance that we've given in Q3. There are going to be times, like in Q2, where the EBITDA beat comes in later in the quarter. In those times, we just don't have enough time to reinvest back in the business, especially at the levels of efficiency that we desire. Q2 was one of those quarters where we're happy to drop it to the bottom line.

[Operator]

The next question is from Ross Sandler of Barclays. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Ross Sandler, Analyst at Barclays]

Thanks, guys. Just a quick follow-up on the AV. Then I had a question about the charts in the letter. Tony, I think you have a few hundred robots in Phoenix. How quickly is the plan to kind of bring this to other cities? That's the first question. Then, on those charts, we love the DoorDash charts, but I'm guessing if Uber were to put together their sub-penetration relative to gross profit, it would probably look kind of the same for their leading markets. Are there examples of cities or countries that you are demonstrating the same trend as the U.S., but you've either come from behind or you've come like head-to-head and overtaken one of your competitors on DashPass or Wolt penetration for subscribers. Thanks a lot.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Sure. I can start on the AV question. Yeah, we're very excited about what's happening in Phoenix. Like as I mentioned, there's a lot we got to go figure out. I'm a big believer that you really have to nail something before you scale it, especially in the area of autonomy where you're really solving the problems of six separate individual companies almost, and you have to be great at all of them. It's just tightly orchestration, again, between the operations and the technology. I can't stress that enough because that is the name of the game. I think just doing one or the other, is not going to get it done. There's a lot of work to be done. We are in parallel, of course, securing permits, because we work with cities to actually unlock a lot of this.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

We do have plans to expand. We'll share certainly more as time comes, but we thought that it'd be helpful to offer just one milestone that we've accomplished and are excited about. The road ahead for AV is very exciting, but it's going to take time and mostly it's going to take great execution between the operations and the technology, and that's what we're most excited about.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Hey, Ross, on your second point, let me take a step back and talk about subscription more broadly. If you think about subscription, it's been a key area of focus for us for the past couple of years. Subscription continues to do well, whether it's subscribers in the U.S. or international, the growth rate are some of the highest that we've seen in the last couple of years. The whole thesis for us was, as DashPass penetration continues to increase, overall gross profit per mile continues to increase. We look at the penetration levels, we're still very early. We're seeing similar behavior in the international markets compared to what we see in the U.S., albeit some of the international countries are slightly behind because we launched subscription slightly later than what we did in the U.S.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

For specific examples, I'm going to talk about some of the examples under the group. If you're thinking about the U.K. market, we are gaining share. We're one of the fastest-growing in that market. We're accelerating growth, we're accelerating paid subscriber growth, volume growth compared to what we've seen in the last couple of years. Even outside of Deliveroo, when you look at some of the countries that we operate in, Wolt, in majority of the countries that we operate, we are continuing to gain share. The key thing for us is we are not just looking at share gains, we're looking at what the order rate improvements are. We look at either the three months or the six months, we have continued to improve order rates.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

At the same point across both Deliveroo as well as Wolt, it's been a way for us to drive efficient growth, where when you look at the unit economics, either on a year-over-year basis or over the last couple of years, we've done a pretty good job of improving that. Net-net, we've talked about some of the countries before, whether it's U.K., Israel or some of the other markets. We're continuing to do really well in terms of overall share gain as well as the underlying improvements in core metrics.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Brian Nowak, Analyst at Morgan Stanley]

Hey, guys. Excuse me. Thanks for taking my question. Now that you've got the tech stack sort of built as of the spring, I know you've been testing a lot of modules and new capabilities. Can you give us some examples where you're seeing early signal with actual quantifiable benefits of the new modules that give you confidence you're going to get real return and ROIC on these investments as we go into 2027?

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Sure. Yeah. Hey, Brian. I would say we're still building. The way you build these single tech stacks, the better analogy, it's not like a Lego project where there's a finishing step in the instruction manual. It's more like you're constantly first you have to replace an engine while you're flying a plane that's growing in speed and climbing in altitude, and then you're constantly making tweaks. That's probably the more appropriate analogy. We're doing it and where are we seeing benefits? A lot of places already. You're seeing conversion wins from improvements in search. You're seeing wins in automation, in terms of our customer support flows and by bringing things from one place that was more automated to another place that was less automated.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

The theme really is what we're trying to do, and why there's a thesis for a return here is because you're taking the best-of-breed feature and literally offering it to all of our 41 markets. This is not like taking one stack and then just copying and pasting everything into all of the brands. It's actually literally taking the best of each and then putting it into a completely new engine, and then running it. It's like building a new company. That's why it's really hard. Candidly, it's not something that you would do if you do not believe more in the future than you did in the past. That doesn't even take into account the velocity benefits, after you complete the project, where if you were to ship once from an infrastructure perspective, that it actually gets shipped everywhere

[Operator]

The next question comes to the line of Ron Josey of Citigroup. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Ron Josey, Analyst at Citi]

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to go back to the gross profit and DashPass chart that we had in the letter here. The slope of the lines more recently are steepening for both, which is talking to all the trends that we saw. I'd love to hear more, maybe, Tony, on just the plans or strategies to continue adding value to the program and the push and pull, what that value does to overall gross profit. More recently, I think, the company launched newer or greater fees for larger delivery radiuses. Talk to us about the reasoning for those fees and the benefits. Thank you.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Yeah. Hey, Ron. Let me take a stab at both of those, right? Look, subscription continues to do well. Our thesis has always been, as consumers habituate and we graduate them to DashPass, their overall value proposition from not just a gross profit, but order frequency as well as retention, goes up. The example that we put in the chart was largely a Jan 2021 cohort, and we wanted to use that because it was sufficiently old enough where you could actually see the trends. It's largely representative of what we see in the other cohorts, in the rest of the portfolio as well, where what we see is, as consumers order more with us, as they retain more, they graduate to DashPass, and as they graduate to DashPass, they continue to spend more with us.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

We're seeing that not just in the older cohorts, but in some of the newer cohorts as well, which is ultimately leading to some of the growth that you're seeing in DashPass, right? I talked about the fact that in the U.S. in DashPass Q2, the growth rate in terms of paid subscribers was one of the highest that we've seen probably in the last two years. We added more number of paid subscribers in the last year compared to the two prior years. A lot of that is because the underlying product continues to get better, right? If you're on DashPass, you get to access retail, grocery, other categories, which ultimately drives more value to DashPass subscribers. The way we increase the value proposition of DashPass, to your question, is making the underlying product better.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Whether it's more selection, making the quality of the product better, continuing to drive affordability. When we do that, we see clear improvements in both adoption of DashPass as well as the engagement from a DashPass perspective. Your second point, look, if you're thinking about the new fee service that we talked about the last couple of weeks ago, look, it's largely a realignment of consumers, what they pay, compared to the time and effort that dashers put in a delivery. If you're thinking about it from an impact to the P&L perspective, I wouldn't think of it that way. Based on what we've seen in the market so far, the fee is largely similar or slightly less, actually, for the vast majority of the orders. I wouldn't expect it to be a massive impact, especially in the markets that we've launched it so far.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Justin Post of Bank of America. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Justin Post, Analyst at Bank of America]

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I just wonder if you can give us any agentic traffic update, if you're seeing any traffic from there. Given your huge merchant scale, are there ways where you could really capitalize on that traffic as they roll out booking capabilities and maybe even lower your marketing costs? Thank you.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

Yeah. Hey, Justin. I'll take that one, and feel free to add, Ravi. Let's say, in short, is no. The volume's quite low, I think from some of the agentic partners that we've been testing with. It also isn't that surprising, I think, for a couple of reasons. I think first, I think especially for some of the larger platforms out there, their core focus has been on the enterprise and much less, especially on coding agents and probably less on the agentic side. The second thing is just structurally speaking, if you look at it from a consumer's perspective, consumers don't really care what you call this thing, whether you call it agentic flows and pre-agentic flows, post-agentic flows. They honestly just care about getting their burrito or their pair of Nike or their stock of weekly groceries. That's what they care about.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

At the end of the day, what that means is they care about the end-to-end experience, right? If you think about it, we're effectively the only place that can offer that, whether that starts by knowing where all the inventory sits, what's in stock, what's not in stock, obviously managing the logistics at both the merchant as well as at drop-off, then, of course, solving exception handling when things were to go awry, if there's the wrong item or the wrong promotion applied to an item. I think these are all the details you kind of have to get right if you want to do agentic commerce for our category. That's just not something that I think a lot of people are doing, but we're kind of filling the void, right? It's why DoorDash launched Ask DoorDash, where we effectively are solving that.

[Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO at DoorDash]

We're still very open, very excited to test all sources of incremental traffic, which is what we believe can happen. Something I said probably five years ago, is that in the business world, this was 2021, I was forecasting that there'd be two big wars that would occur. One is kind of the battle for attention, and you see that playing out with chat assistants and other types of more powerful assistants now. The other is kind of the battle for atoms, and I do think that the two services will come and partner with one another. Our focus is squarely on making sure that we master the physical world so we can be the most useful to all these digital assistants when they kind of come around to focus on agentic commerce that we'll be willing partners and grow together.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Doug Anmuth of JP Morgan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Doug Anmuth, Analyst at JP Morgan]

Great. Thanks for taking the question. I know you don't manage for take rate, just wanted to get a little bit more color just on net revenue margin and the pickup that you saw in Q2. Just trying to understand some of the drivers there in terms of how much might have been Deliveroo contribution versus advertising and fee changes and how you think about that going forward. Thanks.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Hey, Doug. Let me take that one. Look, you're right. We're not operating the business towards take rate or net revenue margin percentage. Our goal has been always to optimize for overall profit dollars. As you can see, pretty strong quarter from that perspective, as well as the Q3 guide. Look, lots of moving parts within the take rate. The Q1, Q increase, which is what I think you're referring to, is largely from Dasher. Look, Dasher costs are seasonal for us. When you go from Q1 to Q2, Dasher costs are lower in Q2. That's what gave rise to the tick up in take rate that you saw from Q1 to Q2.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

If you're thinking about from a modeling perspective, what I would expect for the rest of the year, I'd expect take rate to slightly be in the similar range in Q3, so flattish from Q2 to Q3 and lower in Q4. Again, as a reminder, I've mentioned this before, Q4 Dasher costs are higher for us. That'll impact take rate, so you should expect Q4 take rate to be slightly lower than where Q3 is. Net net, look, the goal for us is not to manage to a specific line in the P&L, especially the take rate percentage. Our goal is to invest flexibly up and down the P&L.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Tom Champion of Piper Sandler. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Tom Champion, Analyst at Piper Sandler]

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Ravi, I'd just be curious about your big picture view on AI spending and the ROI that you're seeing. I'm curious if it's impacted your future hiring plans at all. Thank you.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

Sure. Let me start. Not just purely about driving cost efficiency for us. Like we said earlier on the call, we are encouraging our teams to use AI across the board. For us, ultimately, the goal is how do you build better products for customers, which will ultimately drive both growth as well as overall profit dollars. Ask was one of the examples in which we're driving benefit to customers. We've done similar things on both merchant side, where we're helping merchants onboard faster. On the Dasher side, we've built conversational buddies where Dashers, if they're stuck, they can actually chat with the agent to help themselves get unstuck. At the same point, look, we're seeing productivity in the cost across the board. Internally, we're using it in sales, accounting, marketing, finance as well. The goal for us has always been, it's not just purely about encouraging the usage.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

How do you actually drive efficiency as well? We've taken a number of steps. We've built models where internally the tasks are routed to the right model, depending on what the actual cost, quality, and efficiency is. We've put caps in place. We've also incorporated some of the AI budgets into teams' existing budgets. Look, we are seeing gains from the usage of AI. The sharper question for us is how do you take the efficiency gains and reinvest that back in the business? Look, we are investing in building some large areas. We've talked about autonomy, we've talked about AI, we've talked about the unification of the tech stack. These are all areas where we think it's going to be strong long-term ROI for us. The goal for us is how do you take the efficiency gains, whether it's AI or any other part of the P&L.

[Ravi Inukonda, CFO at DoorDash]

The philosophy is same. How do you reinvest that back in the business ultimately to build scale and durability over a longer period of time, which leads to higher overall free cash flow production? That's largely how we're thinking about the efficiency gains, but we are happy with what we're seeing in the business today.

[Operator]

There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Goodbye

Participants

Executives

• Weston Twigg, VP of Investor Relations
• Tony Xu, Co-Founder, Chair, and CEO
• Ravi Inukonda, CFO

Analysts

• Michael Morton, Analyst at MoffettNathanson
• Mark Mahaney, Analyst at Evercore ISI
• Nikhil Devnani, Analyst at Bernstein
• Deepak Mathivanan, Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald
• Dominic Ball, Analyst at Rothschild & Co Redburn
• Jason Helfstein, Analyst at Oppenheimer
• Shweta Khajuria, Analyst at Wolfe Research
• Josh Beck, Analyst at Raymond James
• Youssef Squali, Analyst at Truist Securities
• Ross Sandler, Analyst at Barclays
• Brian Nowak, Analyst at Morgan Stanley
• Ron Josey, Analyst at Citi
• Justin Post, Analyst at Bank of America
• Doug Anmuth, Analyst at JP Morgan
• Tom Champion, Analyst at Piper Sandler