Speaking to Forbes in his first interview as a public CEO, Maloney presented a calm, happy face to his excited staff and board members celebrating around him on the floor, with just a hint of the nerves of waiting to go onstage to explain the company live on TV. 'All the back-end teams are done, the only thing left is the technical integration of systems, and we are deeply in the process of that,' Maloney says. Organizational integration and the streamlining of the company's combined customer service operations are completed. Maloney says the merger has happened faster than management may have originally thought. That market opportunity can range in company estimates from $9 billion for online orders overall to the entire take-out and delivery market today, which Maloney would later repeat on CNBC as a $70 billion market to crack. This is an opportunity to show the world this massive industry of takeout.' 'We achieved all this size, and most people don't know who we are. The menu businesses-and GrubHub owns two because each of its ordering brands had acquired one in 2011-will also remain.įor Maloney, the goal of the public offering and the combined public company is to improve awareness for not just one brand, but the whole category. It had already started to redistribute its marketing spend in 2013, as the company increased the marketing budget for GrubHub by $5.8 million and cut $900,000 in ad dollars for the Seamless brand, according to its S-1. That said, GrubHub won't be pushing the Seamless brand in national advertising anymore, the combined company's chief tells Forbes.

'But Seamless has been here 15 years, and it's really strong in New York, it's a religion. So what's in the name? 'Part of the decision factor is it's a great ticker-GRUB is awesome,' Maloney says. So the two joined forces, creating a company that combined for $1.3 billion in gross food sales last year (it takes about a 10% cut) and reached 3.4 million different diners for 2013. But Chicago-based GrubHub was winning almost everywhere else. Seamless has held firmly onto New York City, the country's largest market. Both companies had ambitions to go public independently and win the online takeout space, but gravitated toward different geographies.

Is seamless and grubhub the same