Wonder Raises $650M+ at $9B Valuation, Marc Lore Eyes IPO

Wonder just closed a $650 million-plus Series D at a $9 billion valuation, and the interesting part is not the round itself, it is what the money is supposed to buy. In an exclusive to Fortune, Marc Lore said the company will be 'ready and prepared to go public early next year.' Returning investors Accel, Google Ventures and NEA were joined by new backers AllianceBernstein, ARK Invest and Kayne Anderson, with Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and J.P. Morgan running placement.

The strategic story Wonder is telling is a vertical stack. It already owns Grubhub, bought early last year for $650 million including $500 million in assumed debt, and Blue Apron, picked up in 2023 for $103 million. It recently paid $186.4 million for Sweetgreen's Spyce division and closed on Mighty Quinn's BBQ. Its 135 food halls across 10 East Coast states each run up to 30 restaurant concepts from a single kitchen. Same-service-area sales are reportedly growing roughly 20% year over year, with cost of goods sold tracking better than planned.

The AI angle is a platform called MEL, which Lore describes as tracking blood biomarkers and body composition and then autonomously planning and ordering meals across restaurant delivery, Blue Apron kits and grocery-priced oven-ready meals. That is the pitch to public-market investors, not another food-delivery roll-up but a health-personalized meal operating system that owns its own supply.

The honest caveat is that this is a growth story with real burn behind it. Investor materials reviewed by The Information project Wonder burning nearly $2.7 billion in cash through 2029, with expected losses of roughly $618 million on an adjusted EBITDA basis this year, and positive cash flow only in 2030, after the planned public listing. What the reporting does not give you is where MEL actually sources its biomarker data, how many people currently use it, or how the privacy exposure of linking lab results to grocery orders will be handled.

For a leader watching this space, the thing to track is whether ARK Invest's participation signals real thematic appetite for health-personalized food AI, or whether it is a small check dressing up an otherwise conventional food-delivery consolidation play. The MEL adoption numbers, when Wonder eventually files, will tell you which it is.