Glovo is Kenya's market leader. Uber Eats is a rival here too. This deal would combine them.

Uber has agreed to buy Delivery Hero, the German company that owns Glovo. Glovo is Kenya’s biggest food and grocery delivery app. If the deal goes through, Uber will own both Glovo and Uber Eats in Kenya.

The announcement came out of Berlin on 16 July 2026. Uber and Delivery Hero signed what they call a business combination agreement. Under the terms, Uber is offering Delivery Hero shareholders €41.50 in cash for each share. That values Delivery Hero at about €13.0 billion on a fully diluted basis. Uber frames the same number in dollars as roughly $14.8 billion for the whole company. At current exchange rates the euro figure is close to KES 1.9 trillion.

Delivery Hero is not a household name in Kenya, but its main local brand is. Glovo has been about 94 percent owned by Delivery Hero since July 2022, when the German group completed a €2.3 billion purchase. We explained that ownership when Glovo opened its new Nairobi headquarters and pledged KES 10 billion of investment in Kenya by 2030.

How the deal splits up

The transaction breaks Delivery Hero’s businesses into two piles.

Uber is taking 50 markets that together produced about $42 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025. That is the total value of everything ordered through the apps, not profit. Kenya sits in this pile, under the Glovo brand. So do Uganda, Nigeria, Morocco, Cote d’Ivoire and a long list of others across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.

A separate New York investment firm called SSW Partners is buying Delivery Hero’s businesses in 14 mostly European markets for about €1.4 billion. Uber’s own filings describe these as the markets where Uber Eats and Delivery Hero overlap most directly. Selling them to a third party is meant to keep competition regulators comfortable, because a straight merger in those places would hand Uber too much of the market.

Why Kenya sitting with Uber is worth understanding

Uber Eats already operates in Nairobi. It lists more than 80 restaurants on its Kenyan app. So Kenya is a market where Uber Eats and Glovo compete, yet Kenya was placed in Uber’s pile rather than sold to SSW.

Uber’s paperwork says the SSW markets are “particularly” the overlap markets, which leaves room for exceptions. Kenya looks like one of them. The most likely reason is that Uber Eats is small in Kenya next to Glovo, so combining the two does not concentrate the market the way it would in a country like Spain or Türkiye. That is our conclusion, based on the market positions rather than a stated reason from either company.

It still leaves a question for the Competition Authority of Kenya. A deal that puts the market leader and a rival under the same owner is exactly the kind of transaction a competition regulator examines. Kenya’s watchdog has already shown interest in these platforms. In April 2024 it told Glovo and Uber Eats to open local offices so customer complaints could be settled in Nairobi rather than from abroad.

What changes for you, and when

In the near term, probably nothing. The companies say the deal will not close until the second half of 2027, and only after regulators in many countries approve it. Until then Glovo, Uber Eats and Bolt Food keep running as separate apps. Delivery Hero says its brands will keep operating on the same technology and with the same local teams.

The competitive field in Kenya has already thinned. Jumia Food, once one of the big four, shut its Kenyan food delivery service in December 2023. That left Glovo, Uber Eats and Bolt Food to fight over the market. We have written before about how this platform economy now shapes daily life in Kenyan cities, from rider earnings to how restaurants reach customers.

The longer question is what happens to prices and competition once one company controls two of the three remaining large apps. Fewer independent players can mean higher fees for customers, thinner pay for riders, or tougher terms for restaurants. It can also mean better technology and wider coverage if the merged group keeps investing. Which way it goes depends partly on whether Bolt Food stays strong, and partly on what the Competition Authority of Kenya asks for before it signs off.

For now, Glovo is still Glovo. The owner sitting above it is the thing that is changing. The practical things to watch are two: whether the Competition Authority of Kenya attaches conditions to the deal, and whether your delivery fees move once it actually closes in 2027.