DoorDash (DASH) deserves a second look as the underlying business quietly strengthens and the market appears slow to reflect that progress. The company is evolving beyond restaurant delivery into a broader last-mile fulfillment platform, improving efficiency and expanding its addressable market. With autonomous delivery partnerships and stronger monetization across categories, I believe DoorDash is building a more scalable model with rising cash flow conversion into earnings. For that reason, I remain bullish on DASH.
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Trade AMZN with leverageALSO and the Hardware-Lite Revolution
DoorDash may have just found a way around one of the biggest flaws in its business. Its new partnership with ALSO, Rivian’s (RIVN) spinoff, points to a delivery model that increasingly depends less on gig workers and more on small autonomous vehicles. Up until now, DoorDash was stuck with a business model built on costly, unpredictable, and regulated labor. ALSO’s TM-Q cargo quads give it a different path to keep growing its gross order volumes and underlying profitability.
Essentially, DoorDash eliminates the need to manufacture the vehicles or run the fleet itself. It can actually plug into someone else’s hardware and use automation to handle a bigger share of deliveries. What I like here is how the company starts to look different. Instead of being tightly tied to labor costs, DoorDash looks more like a logistics platform that uses technology to scale. It might not be building the hardware, but it still benefits from a delivery network that doesn’t face wages or surge pricing in the same way.
An interesting aspect here is where these vehicles can go. Notably, they can move through bike lanes and narrower urban streets where a transit van would be awkward or useless. DoorDash brings the software, routing, and customer network. ALSO brings the vehicles. That setup gives DoorDash a way to expand without taking on the cost and headache of owning a huge fleet that starts losing value the minute it hits the road, which could be true for Tesla (TSLA).
A Logistics Giant in Disguise
Yet the ALSO partnership is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. We have seen DoorDash successfully pivot from being “the food delivery app” to the “everything-right-now platform.” Their integration with Deliveroo and Wolt has given them a global footprint with real synergy starting to emerge. Whether it’s a bottle of aspirin from the local pharmacy or a last-minute grocery run, the frequency of use is climbing, and so is the network’s density. The more stops a bot or a Dasher can make in a single zip code, the lower the cost per drop.
It’s this “flywheel effect” that people seem to be underestimating. Every new grocery partnership or retail tie-up adds another layer of stickiness to the DashPass subscription. In fact, we may be reaching a tipping point where the platform becomes a utility rather than a luxury. When you merge this expanding service offering with the efficiency gains from autonomous last-mile tech, you start to see a company that is sort of moving the entire local economy and not just tacos and burgers.
The Valuation Supports Lasting Upside
Now, DASH is down close to 20% this year, and if you zoom out, it’s pretty much flat year-over-year. Add a multiple of 33x on this year’s earnings, and it’s easy to see why some investors stop there and still call it expensive. However, that’s also where things get interesting. When a stock goes nowhere even as the business underneath it improves noticeably, that can be a sign the market hasn’t fully adjusted yet. Sometimes the price looks stuck because investors are still looking at an older version of the company.
The market still seems to view DoorDash as a delivery company that’s hit a wall. Yet the earnings picture is moving in the opposite direction. Consensus for FY2026 earnings per share (EPS) is now at $5.47. More importantly, Wall Street is projecting earnings growth of 39% in FY2026 and 27% in FY2027. At that growth rate, I believe that a 33x multiple starts to look like a bargain very quickly because DoorDash can grow into its valuation and potentially leave it in the dust as these automated efficiencies hit the income statement.
It is true that competitive risks remain a major threat. Uber Eats (UBER) remains a formidable opponent, leveraging its global ride-sharing data to ruthlessly cross-sell deliveries. Then there’s Amazon (AMZN), which has recently expressed interest in the same ALSO vehicle technology for its European “Micro-Hubs,” so the battle for the curb is going to get crowded.
Nevertheless, I believe the market for “instant local commerce” is large enough to support more than one winner. In the meantime, DoorDash’s 65% U.S. market share gives it a “home-field advantage” that may prove expensive for others to replicate.
Is DASH Stock a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Despite its year-to-date pullback, DASH stock maintains a Strong Buy consensus rating on Wall Street, based on 21 Buy and seven Hold ratings. Notably, no analyst rates the stock a Sell. Further, DASH’s average price target of $252.50 implies about 33% upside over the next 12 months.
Final Thoughts
DoorDash has outgrown the narrow thesis that once defined its investment case. This is now a company building infrastructure around local commerce, built on irreplaceable network effects and several credible paths to stronger earnings over time. Competition is not going away, and execution still matters, but I do not think the current valuation fully reflects the business’s maturity. That is why I still see meaningful upside in DASH.