This Delivery App Puts a Courier on Every Corner

In Bogotá’s busiest neighborhoods, the men with orange caps, bags, and the occasional vest or windbreaker stand on almost every corner. They work for Rappi, a two-year-old delivery startup that’s a mashup of Uber Eats, Instacart, and TaskRabbit. Summoned via smartphone, Rappi’s couriers deliver poke bowls, groceries, and even cash, running errands that include paying bills. Regular customers average more than four orders a week, and courier Israel Montes says demand is keeping him better paid than his old minimum-wage job. He delivers restaurant orders on his blue bicycle and has also been hired to give a massage and play video games. As he waits curbside near other couriers, Montes says, “All the time I’m seeing new faces, so many.”

Rappi, which charges customers about $1 an order or a flat $7 a month, has become such a hit in Bogotá and Mexico City that the company has raised $185 million—a near record in Latin America—to set up shop in each of the region’s major cities. Chief Executive Officer Simón Borrero, a Colombian, says Rappi has at least a toehold in 14 cities and will more than double that over the next year. “We’re going to be in every country in Latin America, including the smaller Central American ones,” he says. The goal is to remove “the hurdle of logistics in Latin America, where things could take days to get delivered.”