Rappi Local Multi Vertical Strategy
Sebastian Mejia, co-founder of Rappi, on building for multi-verticality in on-demand
This claim is really about control of the local flywheel, not branding. In on-demand, each city behaves like its own market, with different courier supply, merchant density, traffic patterns, and customer habits. Rappi built one app across food, grocery, pharmacy, e-commerce, travel, and payments, then let local teams tune merchant selection, operations, and promotions city by city. That combination matters because more categories create more repeat orders, and more repeat orders make the courier network cheaper and faster to run.
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Rappi’s multi-vertical model is concrete, not conceptual. The app bundles food, groceries, pharmacy, e-commerce, travel, and payments. More than 90% of customers buy in at least two categories, and monthly order frequency rises from 2 in year 1 to 6 in year 3 and 11 in year 5.
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Local execution is a real operating advantage in Latin America because hyperlocal delivery depends on city level decisions. Rappi describes a structure where local teams control fast execution, while central teams provide data science, product, capital allocation, and shared tooling. That is different from running the region as one uniform market from a distant headquarters.
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The backdrop also made this positioning more valuable. The market was already consolidating, with Glovo exiting Chile and Brazil in 2019 and Uber Eats exiting Argentina and Colombia in 2020. In that environment, the winner is usually one of the top two scaled networks in each country, because density lowers delivery cost and improves merchant coverage.
Going forward, the advantage compounds if Rappi keeps turning a delivery app into a local commerce utility. Each added category, from dark kitchens to payments, gives customers one more reason to open the app, merchants one more workflow to run through it, and couriers one more order to stack on an existing route. That is how a city by city delivery network turns into a regional super app.