When Talabat went public in December 2024, it wasn’t just the UAE’s biggest tech moment of the year, it was the largest tech IPO globally, raising over $2 billion on the Dubai Financial Market.
While the company’s stock has dipped around 9% since listing, Talabat has nearly quadrupled its profitability, according to CEO Tomaso Rodriguez, who spoke in an exclusive interview with CNBC’s Dan Murphy this week.
“We want to be a one-stop shop for convenience,” Rodriguez said. “But we’re not chasing the super app dream. If you don’t have a right to win in a category, you shouldn’t be there.”
Talabat today operates in eight MENA markets, with more than 6.5 million monthly active users. Rodriguez claims the company remains the market leader in every country it serves, often by a factor of three to ten times over the next-largest player. But as we all know, the glaring omission in its footprint is also the region’s biggest prize: Saudi Arabia.
Why Talabat is skipping Saudi – for now
The decision to stay out of The Kingdom is not one of access, Rodriguez insists, but of opportunity cost.
“We could enter Saudi tomorrow. But at this point, every dollar we invest in deepening the markets we’re already in delivers better returns.”
It’s not just rhetoric. Talabat serves a population of 150 million across its active markets, but only 7 million users are active monthly, leaving a long runway for internal growth. In Rodriguez’s view, expanding into a hyper-competitive Saudi market would dilute focus at a time when Talabat’s existing infrastructure can deliver more yield.
If the company does enter Saudi, it likely won’t be through boots on the ground. “It will probably be through M&A rather than organic entry,” he said.
That’s consistent with Talabat’s approach to scale more broadly, build where you’re efficient, buy where it makes sense.
The Instashop deal and what it signals
Earlier this year, Talabat announced that it had acquired Instashop, the UAE-based online grocery platform, for $32 million, fully funded through its internal cash reserves.
Rodriguez praised Instashop’s team and brand, calling the acquisition “complementary” and noting that only a third of Instashop users were already Talabat customers, suggesting significant potential for cross-platform conversion.
“I love the Instashop brand. The overlap is small, which means there’s real upside.”
For now, Instashop will remain independent, a decision to preserve brand equity while layering Talabat’s infrastructure behind the scenes.
Asked if more consolidation is coming, Rodriguez demurred: “The market is still growing too fast. Everyone’s focused on capturing growth, not merging.”
Margin over market
Talabat’s recent product roadmap is engineered not just for top-line expansion but for margin improvement. One standout is Postpaid, a built-in “buy now, pay later” feature that allows users to defer payments to the following month. The product launched after Talabat noticed a dip in activity during the days leading up to payday.
The result? A 14% increase in order frequency among Postpaid users.
“People told me they could finally buy groceries even if they hadn’t gotten their salary yet,” Rodriguez said.
The company is also exploring working capital solutions for restaurants and SME vendors, part of a broader strategy to turn Talabat from marketplace into financial infrastructure for local businesses.
The goal is evidently to keep users sticky, and partners liquid.
That stickiness shows up in grocery metrics. A Talabat user who orders food only will transact around 3.8 times per month. But when that same user orders both food and groceries?
Thirteen times per month.
This kind of engagement translates into loyalty that can’t be easily bought, or displaced. It also makes Talabat less vulnerable to rising customer acquisition costs, something that’s beginning to plague startups across the region.
Weathering the macro
Rodriguez is unusually bullish on macro conditions, and not just because inflation means bigger receipts.
“We operate on margin, not absolutes,” he said. “So if inflation pushes prices up, yes, costs rise, but so does revenue.”
In Egypt, he argues, currency devaluation actually helped the business: as consumers reduced dollar-denominated spending on cars and travel, food delivery became one of the few affordable indulgences.
“Food became the most accessible luxury.”
Rodriguez also pointed to the region’s broader economic resilience. “The Middle East played the pandemic better than most,” he said. “And I think whatever comes next, this region will thrive.”
A patient power play
In a region where many startups are pushing hard into Saudi Arabia, launching multiple verticals, or racing toward super app status, Talabat is doing something arguably far more radical: it’s being patient.
Instead of empire-building, the company is building depth, pursuing only the categories and markets where it can win structurally, be that through fleet leverage, financial innovation, or customer behaviour.
