Wonder is worth $9.65 billion, just raised $650 million — and laid off 150 people anyway

When a company raises $650 million and gets valued at $9.65 billion, you'd expect the next press release to be about hiring. Wonder's next press release, on Tuesday, was about eliminating roughly 150 jobs — 7% of its staff — across its own corporate team and Grubhub, the delivery app it bought last year.

The company says the cuts focus resources on key growth areas as it enters its next chapter, which is what companies say. The chapter in question is a stock market listing: Wonder wants to be IPO-ready by early 2027. And nothing prepares a company for public investors like showing them you can cut.

What Wonder actually is

If you're not on the East Coast, you may never have seen one. Wonder runs more than 150 locations across ten states and Washington, D.C. — glass-fronted "food halls" where a single kitchen cooks a dozen or so restaurant brands, some licensed from real chefs, some invented in-house, for delivery, pickup or a few counter seats. Think ghost kitchen with a storefront and better lighting.

Around that core, founder Marc Lore — the guy who sold Jet.com to Walmart — has bolted on Grubhub (delivery), Blue Apron (meal kits) and, this year, three New York names: Blue Ribbon Chicken, Mighty Quinn's BBQ and Salt Hank's. The stated goal is a "super app" for dinner: one login, whatever you want, however you want it.

It's a clever idea, and it has a problem every restaurant owner in America could have told Lore about in 2018: food has to be cooked by someone, right now, and then it has to get to you hot. Software doesn't make brisket. Neither, it turns out, does a $9.65 billion valuation.

Third round of layoffs, same story

This is at least Wonder's third round of cuts. It trimmed staff in 2022 when it gave up on cooking food inside vans parked outside your house — yes, that was the original model. In early 2025, weeks after the Grubhub deal closed, Grubhub lost about 500 corporate employees, roughly 23% of that team. Now another 150.

Each round came with the same explanation: streamlining, focus, the next chapter. Each round also came right after a big check. The pattern isn't scandalous; it's just how venture-backed food works. Money comes in for the story, cuts come out for the margin, and the margin in restaurants is thin no matter who owns the app.

Why you should care, even if you've never ordered from one

Because the Wonder model is the one every restaurant chain is being told to copy. Fewer cooks, more brands out of one kitchen, an app that owns the customer, and "AI and robotics" in the investor deck to explain how the labor line goes down. Wonder is the lab. When the lab cuts 150 people to make the numbers work for an IPO, it's telling you the numbers don't work on food alone.

There's also the fee question. Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats live on service fees, delivery fees, "small order" fees and the markup restaurants bake into app menus to survive the 15–30% commission. Owning both the kitchen and the app lets Wonder skip the commission fight — and set every fee itself. We've covered what you're allowed to push back on in restaurant junk fees. The FTC's rule on hidden fees applies to a food hall's checkout screen exactly as it applies to a concert ticket.

The honest read

The real restaurant story this summer is the opposite of Wonder's. Second-quarter data showed casual dining coming back, and bars and independents outperforming chains — people are choosing to sit down somewhere with a person who cooked the food and a person who brought it. The 20-minute delivery of a licensed chef's brand out of a shared kitchen is a good product for a Tuesday. It isn't the thing people are spending more on.

So order from a Wonder if there's one near you — the food is decent and the packaging is smart. But tip the human at the end of the chain (our tipping guide has the numbers), read the fee line before you confirm, and remember that the company delivering it just decided 150 salaries were the easiest cost to cut. In a restaurant, they always are.

Wonder wants to be the Amazon of dinner. Amazon, for what it's worth, still hasn't figured out how to cook.