Webvan was an online "credit and delivery" grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, USA, near Silicon Valley. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten U.S. markets: San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Sacramento, and Orange County. The company had origina...
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Webvan was an online "credit and delivery" grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, USA, near Silicon Valley. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten U.S. markets: San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Sacramento, and Orange County. The company had originally hoped to expand to 26 cities.
In June 2008, CNET named Webvan the largest dot-com flop in history, placing it above Pets.com and eight other sites on its list. It is now owned and operated by Amazon.com.
Webvan was founded in the heyday of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s by Louis Borders, who also co-founded the Borders bookstore in 1971. Webvan's original investors included Benchmark Capital, Sequoia Capital, Softbank Capital, Goldman Sachs, and Yahoo!, who encouraged it to rapidly build its own infrastructure (the first-mover...
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