“Honey, can you get the door? Our Symbiosys is here.”
On Wednesday, DoorDash announced its acquisition of Symbiosys, a retail search ad startup that launched two years ago. The deal price is $175 million.
The food delivery service also announced that, as of now, it’s surpassed $1 billion in ad revenue in the past 12 months.
New symbiote
Symbiosys is an apt acquisition for DoorDash. The food delivery platform has been a flagship client for Symbiosys since its early days, along with other online retailers like Best Buy and Chewy.
Bashar Kachachi, the founder of Symbiosis, was previously the director of product management for Google Search Ads 360.
And the startup’s earliest investors include founders from HookLogic, a sponsored listings startup that sold to Criteo in 2016, and Flywheel Digital, a retail ad agency that Omnicom acquired in 2023. And so Kachachi and his team are very familiar with the particular challenges that face brands and retailers when it comes to search.
For example, a grocery brand might want to own a Google search for, say, frozen waffles, but brands aren’t allowed to direct traffic to a third-party site. So Eggo can’t direct that traffic to Walmart, Kroger or any of the local chains where a shopper can purchase its products.
Symbiosys gets around this with what it calls “collaborative bidding.”
Retail media advertisers go through a retailer’s system to get the first-party benefits. Not just closed-loop purchase attribution but the ability to drive traffic to the retailer’s website, since Google results favor sites with more traffic and transactions (like Walmart.com, as opposed to LeggoMyEggo.com).
But the “collaborative” element isn’t just about spending brand ad budgets via the retailer’s Google Ad account seat. Retailers themselves often want to bid on the same grocery traffic.
Kroger, for instance, might have data that shows that customers who start a cart with a frozen item like Eggo waffles are likely to fill and immediately purchase a full cart of groceries. Kroger might want that search term even more than Eggo. To improve the search odds for both the retailer and the brand, the Symbiosys platform allows each to apportion some amount of budget for the bid.
DoorDash’s rationale
But why is this retail search ad model particularly apt for DoorDash?
Well, DoorDash is full of these collaborative search opportunities.
Someone getting food delivered from a nearby restaurant might be prompted to tack a soda onto their order, for example. In that case, the item might not even be coming from the restaurant that person is ordering from. The DoorDash delivery person may pick it up from another nearby location, like 7-11.
In that scenario, there are multiple real-world stores involved that contribute to the order – the restaurant and the 7-11 location – with perhaps Pepsi also bidding to be the chosen soda.
Symbiosys will also extend DoorDash’s ad capabilities to more off-site or other walled garden platforms. The startup was built for Google Search, primarily, but also operates on other retail search platforms, including Amazon, and social networks, such as Meta and TikTok.
