Marc Lore's Wonder Preps Pre-IPO Round Near $11B Valuation

Marc Lore is lining up another fundraise for Wonder, the food-delivery and AI kitchen holding company that owns Grubhub, and this one is being framed explicitly as the runway into an IPO. The Information reported that Wonder is preparing a pre-IPO round that could value it at roughly $11 billion, up from the $7 billion mark set in last year's $600 million round led by Google Ventures.

The company Lore is trying to take public is not just a food-delivery business anymore. Wonder now operates over 120 locations, owns Blue Apron and Grubhub, and, in the part that lands it on an AI newsletter, runs increasingly automated kitchen lines. An 'infinite bowl-making machine' that Wonder paid $186.4 million to acquire from Sweetgreen can reportedly turn out 500 salad, poke, or Tex-Mex bowls an hour against a human line worker's roughly 30 to 45. A feature called Wonder Create lets someone type a prompt like 'fast-casual Mexican restaurant for Gen Z, for people that love cycling' and get back a branded restaurant concept, complete with name, menu, pricing, and nutrition, all running on the same automation stack.

Lore has now raised about $2 billion for Wonder and has told Semafor he is 'working backward from March 30, 2028' for the listing, with a $5 billion revenue target attached. Setting a fresh mark now is how a pre-IPO round is supposed to work: re-price the cap table at something a public book can grow into. A roughly $11 billion sticker while still private is a bet by existing backers that the automated-kitchen story sells to public markets alongside Grubhub's delivery cash flow, not only to venture investors who already own the theme.

The honest caveat is that the specifics of this round, meaning its exact size, who is leading it, and whether Lore is personally writing a check into it, are not confirmed in the material I could retrieve this pass. What the reporting does establish is direction: valuation stepping up, the IPO clock being wound tighter, and a food-delivery holding company being narrated to public investors as an AI-and-robotics platform. If Wonder eventually prints against that automation story on the roughly $5 billion revenue target Lore has been quoting, it becomes the first real read-through on whether public markets price an AI-native restaurant chain any differently than they price a Chipotle.