Rappi's Andres Bilbao: How a Near-Bankrupt Grocery App Became a $5.25B Latin American Delivery Giant

TL;DR: Rappi is an on-demand delivery app based in Bogota, Colombia, that brings restaurant meals, groceries, pharmacy items and even cash to your door, often in minutes. It was started in 2015 by Simón Borrero, Sebastián Mejía and Felipe Villamarín, with Andres Bilbao among the early group that built it. TechCrunch reported in July 2021 that Rappi raised over $500M at a $5.25B valuation, bringing total funding to over $2 billion. On The Product Market Fit Show, Bilbao explained that the first version, grocery delivery, was going nowhere. Then the team put the 20 to 25 best restaurants in Bogota on the app, sent couriers to stand in line and pay, and growth took off. The episode aired in September 2024 (Season 3).

A note on sourcing. Anything labeled "as he shared on the show" comes from the interview and has not been independently confirmed. Funding and financial figures carry a source and a date and were checked against press coverage in October 2026.

What does Rappi do?

Rappi is a delivery app. You open it, order food, groceries, medicine or almost anything else, and a courier brings it to you. In big Latin American cities it is known for speed. As Pablo described on the show, the app showed a 10-minute countdown timer the moment he ordered, and the order beat it. Bilbao mentioned Rappi's Turbo service as the current version of that promise.

According to TechCrunch and LAVCA coverage from July 2021, Rappi began with beverage delivery and later added meals, groceries, tech goods and medicine. As Bilbao described on the show, the app also grew services you would not expect from a food app. One was a free-text "get me anything" service. Another was RappiCash, which brings physical cash to your door like a mobile ATM.

Bilbao is clear about how good the experience is in Rappi's home market.

"You cannot get McDonald's in 10, 12 minutes. You cannot. Only here." — Andres Bilbao, Rappi

Key stat: as he shared on the show, a restaurant order took about 45 to 50 minutes in the early days. Today the same kind of order can arrive in about 12 minutes.

Who founded Rappi?

Press coverage, including Wikipedia's summary of it, names Simón Borrero (CEO), Sebastián Mejía and Felipe Villamarín as the founders, starting in 2015. Bilbao is described as a co-founder in his own bios and on the show. Juan Pablo Ortega is also listed in some sources.

On the show, Bilbao told a longer story. He and Simón grew up in the same small, close-knit circle in Cali, Colombia, and knew each other from age 16 or 17. Around 2010, after he got early admission to Dartmouth's Tuck business school, he started talking with Simón about grocery delivery through an app. At the time they wanted to do software, not logistics.

Before Rappi, the group ran a company called Grubility, which built apps for supermarkets. Bilbao was honest about it. They could never turn it into a real product and had to build a new app for every client. Grubility's partners also struggled with the delivery side.

The trigger for Rappi, as he shared on the show, was watching Instacart raise a large round. Felipe, who had been Grubility's first employee, wanted to quit. Instead he said, let's start Rappi. Bilbao went to McKinsey and ended up in Sydney, then came back and ran Grubility while Simón and Felipe started Rappi. Eventually everyone moved into Rappi.

"But the story of Rappi is more of a story of mindset, perseverance and growing with the business." — Andres Bilbao, Rappi

At Rappi, Bilbao said he ran the call center, last-mile logistics and operations, then the restaurant business (its largest), then supermarkets (its second largest). He also worked on fraud, dark kitchens and expansion. As he shared on the show, he stepped back from day-to-day operations about a year and a half to two years before the interview, and now mostly invests.

How much has Rappi raised?

Rappi is one of the best-funded startups ever to come out of Latin America. The figures below come from press reports.

• Y Combinator. Rappi went through YC. Sources disagree on whether it was 2015 or the Winter 2016 batch.
• 2019: SoftBank, up to $1 billion. Crunchbase News reported that SoftBank Group and the Vision Fund would each commit up to $500M.
• September 2020: $300M, as cited in TechCrunch's July 2021 coverage.
• July 2021: over $500M Series F at a $5.25B valuation, led by T. Rowe Price, with Baillie Gifford, Third Point, Octahedron, GIC and SoftBank participating (TechCrunch, LAVCA, July 2021).

Key stat: total funding was over $2 billion after the July 2021 round, per Crunchbase data cited by TechCrunch.

Earlier backers named in that coverage include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and Y Combinator. As he shared on the show, Bilbao believes Rappi was a16z's first investment in Latin America, the second or third Colombian company to go through YC, and the biggest round ever raised in Colombia at the time.

"I think we were the first A16z investment in Latam, something like that." — Andres Bilbao, Rappi

What happened since. As of 2025, Bloomberg Línea reported CEO Simón Borrero saying Rappi had been profitable for four straight quarters, with positive EBITDA, and was reinvesting all of its profit into growth. He said the company was in no hurry to go public. La República later reported, citing a filing with Colombia's Superintendencia de Sociedades, that Rappi posted a net profit of 210,176 million Colombian pesos in 2025, up from 97,250 million in 2024, its second profitable year in a row. As of October 2026, I could not find a confirmed IPO date. Data sites list 2025 debt and convertible-note deals, but their details conflict, so they are left out here.

How did Rappi find product-market fit?

Rappi did not find fit with its first idea. Grocery delivery was not working.

As he shared on the show, the team was sure it was heading for bankruptcy. Then someone, maybe Simón, suggested adding the best 20 to 25 restaurants in Bogota to the app. Growth went, in his word, "obscene."

Bilbao has a sharp definition of why that worked. Groceries were a convenience. Your favorite restaurant at home, when it did not even offer delivery, was something you could not get before.

"My understanding, my current understanding of product market fit is doing something or providing a service or as a user, achieving something that before you could not do. It's not about better. It's about impossible." — Andres Bilbao, Rappi

The clever part was how they got the restaurants. They did not sign them up. Negotiating with each one would have taken months. Instead they posted the menus and sent a courier to stand in line, pay and bring the food back.

"No, dude, you just sent the courier. So you just got the menus, put them on the app, and then people start ordering." — Andres Bilbao, Rappi

The early experience was slow and rough, he said. But it was great in the one way that mattered: you could not do it before. Today, he noted, Rappi has tablets and full restaurant integrations, like Uber Eats.

For more on this pattern, see product-market fit for marketplaces and product-market fit in a two-sided marketplace.

How did Rappi hack couriers, payments and Uber?

Almost every early system at Rappi was a hack that got replaced later.

Couriers fronted the money. As he shared on the show, early couriers needed about $80 to $100 of their own working capital to pay for orders, and Rappi paid them back. Later they got cards. Eventually they were taken out of the money flow altogether.

"That has a ton of iterations, but at the beginning, we literally had to have couriers put money as working capital." — Andres Bilbao, Rappi

Order assignment was a race. The first algorithm showed every order to all couriers within about a mile, and the first to tap got it. The team called it "the finger wars." It sounds crude, but with only a few engineers it was a fast, efficient way to assign orders.

Cash and fraud. Colombia ran heavily on cash, and payments in Latin America are complex. RappiCash meant literally handing out cash, which made fraud a constant fight. Bilbao said the team got "a street PhD" in it.

Uber was an existential threat. Uber came in with a head start from ride-hailing, which it dominates in the region, and a lot of money. Bilbao compared delivery to the show Highlander: competitors fight until one is left, maybe two.

"This is a winner take most market." — Andres Bilbao, Rappi

That, he said, is why you have to be exceptional at fundraising. He also argued that, at least then, raising big rounds from US funds meant Latin American founders had to come across as "American-ish," with US education and fluent English. He called that unfair but real.

What does Bilbao look for in founders now?

Bilbao now mostly invests and runs Makers, a program that places top undergrads and recent grads as interns under experienced founders. As he shared on the show, Makers had trained about 450 people in roughly 12 Latin American countries, and its alumni had raised about $15 million. The program is free, which is why he jokingly calls it "for-loss." He also co-hosts a free Fundraising School for Latin American founders.

His filter for founders is extreme.

"Dude, I always look for people who are crazy. Because if you're not crazy, like a reasonable person builds reasonable businesses and you're looking for an unreasonable outcome." — Andres Bilbao, Rappi

He gave the example of a 19-year-old founder in Argentina who told him he wanted to "kill Google." But he paired that with a warning. Much of the drive behind outlier founders, he said, comes from fear and a sense of worthlessness. Waking up in a panic, berating people by 10 a.m. and not sleeping are not normal parts of startup life. He credits hard therapy with making him far more productive while working fewer hours. Fear, mistrust and self-doubt, he said, are all "extremely unproductive."

For more on this, see founder mental health.

Key lessons from Andres Bilbao's playbook

1. Aim for impossible, not better. Grocery delivery was a nicer way to do something people already did. Restaurant delivery from places that did not deliver was new. That is where Rappi's growth came from. 2. Fake the supply side until it works. Rappi did not sign restaurants up first. It sent couriers to stand in line and pay. Integrations came later, once demand was proven. 3. Ship the crude version of every system. Courier-funded payments and a tap-first "finger wars" algorithm let a tiny team move fast. Each was rebuilt many times as the company scaled. 4. In a winner-take-most market, fundraising is a core skill. Bilbao's top regret was not learning fundraising sooner. Rappi raised a lot, but he said there was far too much dilution. 5. Fix the founder, not just the company. His other piece of advice to his younger self was to start serious therapy as early as possible, because fear and self-doubt slow you down.

For more on building in the region, see product-market fit for Latin America startups.

Listen to the full interview: He took on Uber & grew Rappi to $5B: here's why the craziest founders often win.

FAQ: Rappi

Q: What is Rappi? A: Rappi is an on-demand delivery app based in Bogota, Colombia, founded in 2015. It delivers restaurant meals, groceries, pharmacy items and more across Latin America, and is known for very fast delivery in its core cities.

Q: Who is the CEO of Rappi? A: Simón Borrero is Rappi's co-founder and CEO. He started the company with Sebastián Mejía and Felipe Villamarín. Andres Bilbao, the guest on this episode, is also a co-founder and, as he shared on the show, had stepped back from day-to-day operations about a year and a half to two years before the September 2024 interview.

Q: How much funding has Rappi raised? A: Rappi had raised over $2 billion as of its July 2021 Series F, which TechCrunch reported at over $500M and a $5.25B valuation, led by T. Rowe Price.

Q: Who are Rappi's investors? A: Named investors include SoftBank, T. Rowe Price, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, Y Combinator, Baillie Gifford, Third Point, Octahedron and GIC.

Q: Is Rappi profitable? A: In 2025, CEO Simón Borrero told Bloomberg Línea the company had been profitable for four straight quarters with positive EBITDA. La República reported a 2025 net profit of 210,176 million Colombian pesos, based on a Superintendencia de Sociedades filing.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Andres Bilbao, Rappi — co-founder who ran Rappi's call center, logistics, restaurant and supermarket businesses, and now invests in Latin American founders through Makers and a free Fundraising School.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: October 2026