Square buys Caviar, a food-delivery start-up, for reported $90 million

Online payments company Square announced Monday that it has acquired Caviar, a San Francisco food-delivery start-up. The deal is reportedly worth $90 million, all in stock.

Caviar specializes in providing delivery services for restaurants that do not offer deliveries of their own. The service launched in 2012 and has since expanded to Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, New York, Seattle and Washington.

Square, which offers small businesses a register service for accepting payments and tracking sales, said the Caviar acquisition gives it one more way to serve its more than 50,000 restaurant clients.

“Caviar’s curated, seamless delivery experience is exactly the kind of service we want to provide buyers and sellers,” Square Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said in a statement. “By making delivery such a fast, friendly, and easy process, Caviar gives time back to restaurants so they can focus on what they do best -- cooking great food for their customers.”

In the near term, Caviar will continue to operate as an independent company, but the Square acquisition should allow the food-delivery start-up to scale. Although Caviar says it has delivered more than 1 million meals to date, it still only serves “hundreds” of restaurants.

Other food-delivery start-ups include GrubHub and Seamless, but those services cater specifically to businesses that already have delivery fleets.

Follow me on Twitter at: @sal19