The opening slide of Caroline Mutuku’s keynote at Glovo Kenya’s Future of Commerce Summit yesterday said more in one sentence than most companies do in a strategy document. “We are building the largest marketplace in Kenya to give you access to anything in minutes.” Not the largest food delivery app. Not the largest on-demand platform. The largest marketplace, full stop, for anything, in minutes. I have written about Glovo since it arrived in Kenya in February 2019, and this is the clearest statement as far as I can tell of what the yellow app I reviewed back then is becoming. 

The summit, held in Nairobi at the Radisson Blu in Upper Hill, was Glovo’s first in Kenya after two editions in Lagos, Nigeria, and it brought together the many businesses that trade on the platform with many of them being small and medium-sized enterprises, as well digital payments companies, retailers and real estate operators. I also moderated the opening panel, which I have written about separately. This post is about the keynote that preceded it, because Caroline, Glovo Kenya’s Country Managing Director, used her twenty minutes to provide a really illuminating perspective on the state of digital commerce in Kenya from Glovo’s substantial market perspective. 

From “Order Something” To “An Everything App”

She began with the origin story of Glovo being launched in Barcelona, Spain, in early 2015 by Oscar Pierre, fresh from Georgia Tech and the American on-demand economy, and Sacha Michaud, a seasoned entrepreneur. The first app had two buttons: order something, and send something. It was customers asking riders to fetch food from McDonald’s and KFC that turned a courier app into the platform we know today, with food, groceries, shops, pharmacy, electronics, beauty, pets and parcel delivery under one roof. Both founders have been in Kenya in the last twelve months; Oscar was here last year, Sacha opened the Nairobi office in May 2026 and is due back in November 2026. Since mid-2022 Glovo has been part of Delivery Hero, the listed German group that owns 94% of the business. 

The global numbers set the scale. 21 countries, 1,800+ cities, 3,000+ employees, around 150,000 stores and restaurants taking orders every day, 190,000+ active riders, 600+ brands advertising on the platform, and 30+ million customers. The map on the screen ran from Spain through Italy, the Balkans, Ukraine and Kazakhstan to Morocco, Tunisia, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya.

Kenya, In A Nutshell

Then she narrowed it all down to Kenya where Glovo now operates in more Kenyan cities than any other market in its portfolio, by her own account: Nairobi and its satellites of Ngong, Rongai, Karen, Syokimau and Thika, then Nakuru, Naivasha, Nanyuki, Kisumu, Eldoret, Machakos and Mombasa, with Diani and Nanyuki added as what she called holiday destinations, where demand spikes in school holidays and over the summer. The snapshot on the slide read 6,000 vendors, more than 3,000 riders, 600 direct jobs and an Africa customer support hub in Nairobi. The jobs number is the one to watch: the ambition is 1,200 by the end of 2027, and she said it may land higher because a second office has just opened to house hub support staff. Outside Spain, she said, Kenya is one of the biggest hubs Glovo has globally. 

Against the backdrop of a 58 million population and 19 million urban Kenyans, those figures are modest. That, as it turned out, was her point.

GMV Up 40%, Orders Up 33%: The Shopping Basket In Kenya Is Getting Bigger 

The performance slide of her keynote had two numbers: gross merchandise value growing at around 40% a year, and order volume growing at 33%. Basically, Customers are placing higher-value orders, which means the business is growing faster in value than in volume, and that is what a maturing marketplace looks like. She said it explicitly: customers are becoming more confident placing high-value orders on the platform.

The second performance insight was about time of day. Breakfast and lunch are the fastest-growing occasions on the platform, and the data has Glovo asking its restaurant partners to open earlier. If you open at nine, open at eight. If you open at eight, open at seven, because from half past six in the morning customers are already on the app searching for ready breakfast, milk, bread and spreads. She told us that their account managers would be sharing the occasion data, and suggested December 2026, when many households are without domestic help, as the moment to test an earlier open. I heard the same point from her on my podcast a week or so ago; the difference is that she was saying it to the restaurateurs who can act on it.

Glovo Growth Market Is No Longer Just Westlands. 

The slide that drew the most phones out of pockets showed how Glovo’s adoption in the outskirts neighborhoods is increasing fast. When Glovo started in Kenya its business was high-income Nairobi. Today the growth is somewhere else entirely: Utawala up 135% year on year, Kikuyu and Kinoo up about 100%, Ruiru and Juja up about 85%, and Syokimau and Kitengela, already more penetrated, up 33% Utawala, she noted, is considered small until you go there and see how many people live there, and it is now one of Glovo’s fastest-growing neighborhoods with a shortage of good restaurants to serve it. The corridor past Mountain View towards Kikuyu is growing at 100% and needs grocery partners. Some of the retailers in the room, she said, are already scouting locations in these estates, and Glovo wants more of them.

The logic she set out is simple: The way a marketplace grows is by adding supply. More restaurant and grocery partners in a neighbourhood means more choice for a customer who opens the app there, which means more checkouts, which attracts the next partner. The outskirts are where that flywheel is spinning fastest.

What Are Kenyans Searching For On Glovo? 

Then came the search data, which is where Glovo’s strategy comes from. Between January 2026 and September 2026 the fastest-growing searches on the platform were baby products, up 48%; beauty and personal care, up 45%; small electronics and accessories, up 42%; and large electronics and appliances, up 40%. Customers are searching for TVs, fridges and microwaves on an app that most Kenyans still think of as a way to get chips and chicken delivered. She was candid that this search behaviour has defined the last 12 months of partner recruitment and is influencing 2027 plans as well: which vendors to bring on, how many, in which neighbourhoods, through which channel. The customer is essentially co-creating Glovo’s roadmap.

Glovo Is Inside ChatGPT & Claude Driving A 41% Conversation Rate

A surprising if not unexpected insight from Caroline’s keynote was not that Glovo integrated with ChatGPT and Claude this year — it was that when her nanny sends her the shopping list, she photographs it, uploads it to Claude, and Claude tells her which grocery store(s) on Glovo to buy from, taking promotions and delivery times into account. The bigger Glovo insight is orders that begin in an AI assistant convert at 41% against an average of 33% in the app, a conversion rate 24% better than Glovo’s own app. 

My understanding is that it says less about the AI chatbots and more about intent. Someone who has gone to the trouble of describing a basket to an AI assistant has already decided to buy; the AI assistant simply removes the browsing. It is early, the integration only happened Kenya in July 2026, and the base is small. But a 24% conversion improvement is the kind of number that shifts marketing budgets, and it is a clear signal that the next battle for Kenya’s digital commerce market may be fought inside the chat window rather than an app. 

22% Have The App, 7% Have Ordered, & Kenya Is At 0.05 Penetration. 

Caroline then shared thayt 22% of urban Kenyans have downloaded the Glovo app. 7% have placed at least one order. Given that Kenya has 19 to 20 million people in urban locations, that is roughly 4 million downloads and around 1 million people who have ever ordered. “So you can imagine the database that already exists,” she said, “But still, we are just at the beginning.”

The chart that followed is the one I will be quoting for the rest of the year. Online food delivery penetration, measured as online food orders per capita per year across the total population, by Glovo’s own estimates: South Korea at 20, China at 12.4, the United Arab Emirates at 12, the United Kingdom at 9.4, the United States at 7.2, a run of European markets between 1.7 and 3.8, and Kenya at 0.05. 

She then borrowed the William Gibson line that the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed, and argued that what has already happened in Seoul and Shanghai tells Glovo how big the Kenyan opportunity is. Her view of where it ends is that functional shopping, the toiletries and detergents nobody enjoys buying, will be outsourced to delivery, and that malls will become places for experiences and gourmet choices rather than errands.

The 2027 Plan: Parner-Funded Incentives & New Cities

Caroline’s keynote closed with two commitments for 2027. The first is a change to the growth playbook. Since launch, Glovo has acquired new customers by waiving its own delivery and service fees on first orders. From 2027 it is inviting restaurant partners, and later grocers once the current test concludes, to add a partner-funded discount on a hero product they want a new customer to try first. In return the partner gets performance marketing, Glovo’s CRM reach, and premium in-app placement, in a programme the room already knew as Heat. It is, in effect, a retail media product dressed as a customer acquisition programme, and it moves some of the cost of growth from Glovo’s balance sheet to its partners’. Some partners have already been invited into the test.

The second is geography. Before the end of the first half of 2027 Glovo will open one more location in Kenya, a holiday destination by her hint, and it hopes to open two more by the end of the year, subject to feasibility studies the team asked her not to pre-empt.

The 3 Big Takeaways From Caroline Mutuku’s Keynote 

Three things stuck with me from Caroline’s keynote. The first is that the 40% against 33% gap matters more than either number alone. A marketplace that grows value faster than volume is one whose customers trust it with bigger baskets, and that is the precondition for the everything app she described. It is also what makes the fridge and television searches credible rather than curious.

The second is the 0.05 penetration. A market with Kenya’s smartphone penetration, mobile money habits and a median age of around 19 should not stay at a twentieth of an order per person per year for long. The warning is that the gap is not demand. The outskirts data proves the demand is there. The gap is supply and affordability: enough restaurants and grocers in Utawala and Juja, at prices that make a delivered basket cheaper than a matatu to the mall. That is a partner problem and a pricing problem before it is a technology problem, which is why she spent so much of her time asking the room to open earlier and build in the estates.

The third is what was not on the slides. Uber agreed in July 2026 to acquire Delivery Hero, which owns 94 per cent of Glovo, in a deal placing Kenya in Uber’s portfolio and is not expected to close until the second half of 2027. The 2027 plan Caroline presented will be delivered by a company that may have a new owner by the time it is complete, and it will be delivered under the watchful eye of Kenya’s Competition Authority that will be looking at commissions, rider pay and pricing power. None of that was mentioned, and on a partner day it was never going to be. But it is the reason the targets she put on the screen, the 1,200 jobs, the 3 new cities, the partner-funded incentives, carry more weight than they would in an ordinary year.