Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann said he plans to take the company public this year, even though there are rumors swirling that the company is courting sellers, according to a report from Fortune.
“The official line is ‘I can’t comment,’” he said, and later remarked, “Our plan is to take it public.”
Speaking at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Colorado, Lehmann said it wasn’t uncommon for companies to be in conversations about a sale during the process of an IPO. He also said he didn’t know where the rumors started.
There were reports that Postmates was talking to bigger companies like Uber, DoorDash and Walmart about a possible sale. That information came out about five months after Postmates announced a confidential filing for an IPO. At the time, Postmates was operating in 2,940 cities in the United States and Mexico.
Postmates now covers 3,500 cities, and recently introduced a new free service called Postmates Party, which has been very successful and currently accounts for about 15 percent of the company’s orders.
The company is also hard at work on a proprietary rover delivery vehicle called Serve. It uses sensors to traverse the sidewalk and has remote operators on standby in case of any issues. The robot has a friendly, cartoonish appearance with two circular cameras that look like eyes.
Lehmann quipped about what Postmates does with all the data the rover collects: “We’ll do like everyone else and just sell to (the) highest bidder. Given that I was born in Germany, maybe it’s part of my evil plan.”
The rover, which has spatial awareness, currently travels on public sidewalks and only goes short distances. It opens when it gets to its destination and realizes a customer is nearby. Serve has been tested in a senior living community.
Lehmann said he doesn’t think the robot will replace the company’s contract workers. “It will help, it will augment, it will make things possible that weren’t possible before,” he said. “They are here to help us fulfill the dream of having an infrastructure that can deliver goods locally at close to zero cost.”