Grubhub just scooped up 30 Zoomer staffers

Acting on a tip, we stumbled across a Philly surprise in the transcript of a recent earnings call between Grubhub and its investors: the Chicago-based delivery company brought 30 former Zoomer staffers aboard in January. Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney said Zoomer did not have “enough scale to generate positive cash flow.”

“We were opportunistic in bolstering our engineering and operations research teams in January with 30 to 40 engineers and driver analytics experts from Zoomer, a small delivery logistics provider with an exceptional product, but not enough scale to generate positive cash flow,” Maloney said, according to the transcript.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Zoomer CEO Justin Goldman declined to comment.

One source within the company said that Zoomer’s three executives — Goldman, COO Jon Wagner and CTO Robert Shedd — would all be joining Grubhub. We’ve only been able to independently confirm Wagner’s move via LinkedIn.

The quiet Navy Yard-based B2B delivery company, which had all the trappings of being a Philly tech sleeper hit, suddenly shut down last month, with Madison, Wis.-based EatStreet partially acquiring the company’s operations in 10 markets across the country.

Later in the call, Grubhub CFO Adam DeWitt made an important clarification on the terms of the move: The publicly-traded Grubhub did not acquire any assets other than talent.

“We are just adding 30 to 40 developers and engineers from their team, who we believe can accelerate the improvement of our delivery product end to end, including its efficiency,” DeWitt said on the call. “This will drive technology costs modestly higher in the short-term, but we believe will more than pay off in the long term, with better diner retention and lower costs in delivery.”

It sounds like Grubhub is betting on the Zoomer staffers to help bolster revenue, which — according to this this report from Fortune — just barely missed analysts expectations.

“We were able to bring on a lot of very senior, very experienced talent, and I’m excited to see what insights and experience these guys can bring,” Maloney said.

And just who is this cadre of senior staffers moving to Grubhub?

• First up, former Zoomer COO Jon Wagner announced on LinkedIn he’d be joining Grubhub as VP as of February.
• Zoomer’s head of data engineering Christian Heinzmann also joined Grubhub as lead data engineer.
• Max Pollack, head of logistics technology at Zoomer is now lead software engineer at Grubhub.
• Daniel Wigrizer, from Zoomer’s old data analytics team, is now product analyst at Grubhub.
• Former senior software engineer Jon Thompson will retain his title at Grubhub.
• Gregory Diamond, former software engineer at Zoomer is coming over to Grubhub as senior software engineer.
• Penn grad Carolyn Mooney, formerly Zoomer’s decision systems analyst, is now senior analyst of decision engineering.

With all this Philly talent jumping ship, the Chicago company will likely have to open a local beachhead. Katie Norris, a comms associate with Grubhub, told Technical.ly there were “no updates to share at this time” regarding an office in Philly. However, Norris confimed there were no plans for any of the new employees to move from Philly.

Talk about Power Moves.