Now, a startup called Deliverect that has built a platform to integrate the many moving parts that go into ordering and delivery for the average restaurant is announcing a big round of funding to pursue the opportunity. The startup has raised $150 million, a Series D round of funding that values the company at over $1.4 billion. It’s the first time that Deliverect is disclosing its valuation but the company has grown at a pretty torrid rate since that last round. The company plans to use the funding to hire more people, and to build out more functionality on its platform, including an app store to make it easier to integrate more companies as and when they are used by one of their customers. The opportunity that the company has addressed is that while a number of aggregating platforms have emerged for other parts of the hospitality industry — Booking.com, for example, for travel — restaurants and food in general had yet to be addressed.“Food is the last frontier,” Xu said. “If there were no pandemic things would have moved quite slowly because the infrastructure for a restaurant is very fragmented. Deliverect says that longer term, it might potentially consider an IPO, but that is not something on the cards at the moment.