Ninja hires banks to pursue Delivery Hero's Middle East assets

Published: 2026-06-18T08:15:27.000Z

The contest over Delivery Hero's most valuable assets just escalated from speculation into something more concrete. Ninja, the Saudi quick commerce unicorn, has hired global and local banks to advise it on a potential acquisition of Delivery Hero's businesses in the Middle East, according to reporting from Asharq and Bloomberg. Bringing in financial advisers is the step that turns a rumored interest into a serious campaign, since you do not pay banks to build out a deal team unless you intend to move. For Uber, which has spent months trying to swallow the German group whole, this is exactly the complication it did not want. The target list is the part worth dwelling on. Ninja is reportedly focusing first on HungerStation, Delivery Hero's wholly owned Saudi food delivery platform, while exploring the possibility of partnering with another group to acquire parts of Talabat, the Dubai listed business in which Delivery Hero retains an 80 percent stake. HungerStation is the logical opening move, since it sits outside Talabat's listed structure, would be far easier to fold into Ninja's existing Saudi operations, and would face fewer regulatory hurdles than a cross border grab. Talabat is the bigger prize but also the messier one, given its public shareholders and a market value of around $8 billion. The personal backstory gives the whole thing an irresistible narrative arc. Ninja's founding is tied to Ebrahim Al-Jassim, the entrepreneur who originally built HungerStation before a bitter dispute ended with Delivery Hero terminating him and his executive team in 2019, followed by arbitration and a full buyout reported at $297 million in 2023. Al-Jassim then launched Ninja, which raced to unicorn status with a valuation of about $1.5 billion and became one of HungerStation's fiercest local rivals. Hiring banks to pursue HungerStation means he is now formally trying to buy back the company that launched his career, which is the kind of full circle story that rarely plays out in business. The competitive field around Delivery Hero has become genuinely crowded, which is why advisers matter. Uber valued the whole company at roughly 12 billion euros when it lifted its stake to about 37 percent, yet some shareholders argue a sum of parts breakup could be worth more than 17 billion euros, with the Middle East assets alone fetching close to 10 billion. DoorDash has examined the regional arm, and Prosus, a former top shareholder, has been weighing whether to increase its stake to block Uber. Ninja arming itself with banking firepower adds a serious regional bidder to that mix, and signals it intends to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as an opportunistic upstart. The regional read is the heart of it. Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf have become the most fiercely contested delivery markets anywhere, with Keeta, Jahez, noon and others all fighting for share alongside the incumbents. A homegrown unicorn hiring global and local banks to wrest control of foreign owned delivery infrastructure marks a notable shift, suggesting the Gulf increasingly wants to own the platforms shaping its digital economy rather than simply host them.