Marc Lore wants to be ready to ring the opening bell. On Thursday, the serial entrepreneur behind Wonder — the New York food-technology company that owns Grubhub and Blue Apron — announced a more than $650 million Series D at a $9 billion pre-money valuation, and told Fortune the company will be "ready and prepared to go public early next year." It is one of the largest consumer-technology raises of 2026, and Lore is pitching it as the war chest that carries Wonder from a cluster of East Coast food halls to a national, robotics-and-AI-powered platform for every meal.
The round drew a mix of returning and new backers. Existing investors Accel, GV (Google Ventures) and New Enterprise Associates all re-upped, while new money came from funds managed by AllianceBernstein, Cathie Wood's ARK Invest and funds managed by Kayne Anderson Rudnick. Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and J.P. Morgan acted as placement agents. The financing brings Wonder's total raised to more than $3 billion since its 2018 founding, according to the company.
What Wonder actually is
Wonder is not, primarily, an AI company — it is a vertically integrated food operation that happens to be leaning hard into automation. The company runs roughly 135 food halls across 10 East Coast states, and says its footprint has tripled from 46 to 140 locations since its last raise in May 2025. Each location runs up to 30 restaurant concepts — including licensed names like Bobby Flay's Amalfi and Tejas Barbeque — out of a single kitchen. Customers order through Wonder's app, mixing dishes from multiple concepts into one basket, and Wonder cooks and delivers the food itself rather than handing it to a third party.
That model has been assembled largely through acquisition. Wonder bought Blue Apron for $103 million in 2023, acquired Grubhub for $650 million (including $500 million in assumed debt) early last year, and paid $186.4 million in November for Sweetgreen's Spyce division and its Infinite Kitchen, which Wonder bills as the only fully automated bowl-making system in live commercial production. This week it closed on Mighty Quinn's BBQ, and it has signed a partnership with drone operator Zipline to bring aerial delivery to Texas, where Wonder plans to expand next year.
"Wonder was founded with the mission to make great food more accessible," Lore said in the announcement. "By building the technology, robotics and infrastructure behind a new kind of food platform, we're making high-quality food more affordable, more convenient and available to more people than ever before." In an interview with Fortune, he framed the edge more concretely: "That's really where we excel — in places where the food's not currently available, at price points that are currently not possible."
Where AI actually fits
The AI story is real but, for now, mostly ahead of Wonder rather than inside it. The company says the new capital will fund "investments in technology, robotics and artificial intelligence," and its robotics claim — the Infinite Kitchen — is a shipping product that raises kitchen throughput. The more ambitious pitch is a platform Lore calls MEL: an AI system that tracks a user's blood biomarkers and body composition, then autonomously plans and orders their meals across restaurant delivery, Blue Apron meal kits and, eventually, oven-ready grocery-priced meals. Lore says he has been using it himself. "AI knows me better than myself," he told Fortune. "Never would have said that's what I'd pick to eat — but I love it."
That is the "meal-time super app" vision investors are underwriting — a single account that decides what you eat and handles the logistics — but it is aspirational, not the business generating today's revenue. Cathie Wood, whose ARK Invest is a marquee new backer, cast her bet in terms of the economics rather than the app. "Wonder is disrupting an industry that has been slow to change with the kind of scalable, innovative model that we look for across the ARK portfolio," Wood said. "We believe Wonder's technology-forward platform is redefining the economics and experience of restaurant-quality food at scale."
The economics — and the skeptics
Those economics remain the central question. According to investor materials reviewed by The Information, Wonder projects burning nearly $2.7 billion in cash through 2029 and expects to lose roughly $618 million on an adjusted EBITDA basis this year alone before turning cash-flow positive in 2030. The same reporting noted the round fell short of Wonder's initial $11 billion target and carries an IPO ratchet that hands investors extra shares if a public debut prices below 1.5 times the round's share price.
Lore pushed back on the framing. "The economics are often misunderstood," he told Fortune. "You do need to make substantial investment up front — the robotics, the ingredient library. All those suppress profitability in the short-term. But there's a big prize at the end of the day." He said same-service-area sales are growing about 20% year over year and that cost of goods is tracking better than planned. Of the ratchet, he added: "This is the least amount of protection we've ever offered, on a relative basis." He confirmed he personally invested again, as he has in every prior round.
Wonder is a clean test case for the broader "AI-enabled commerce" thesis — that automation and personalization can finally fix the brutal unit economics of food delivery, a business that has humbled DoorDash, Uber Eats and a graveyard of ghost-kitchen startups. Wonder faces that last label directly: Reddit threads in New York, Philadelphia and Washington have accused it of being a ghost kitchen dressed up as a food hall. Lore, who says he has celiac disease, rejects it flatly: "We don't have microwaves. We don't reheat. We actually cook to order."
What to watch
The next milestone is the IPO Lore says is coming "early next year." A public filing would force Wonder to disclose the real numbers behind its 20%-growth and improving-margin claims, and would put the AI-super-app narrative in front of investors who price food companies on cash flow, not vision. If MEL and the Infinite Kitchen deliver measurable margin gains before then, Wonder becomes a proof point for AI-enabled commerce. If not, it will be judged as what it is today — a capital-hungry, coast-bound food operator betting that technology can rewrite a notoriously unforgiving business.
"We believe Wonder's technology-forward platform is redefining the economics and experience of restaurant-quality food at scale."— Cathie Wood, Founder, CEO and CIO, ARK Invest