Less than a decade after its founding, food startup Wonder has seen its footprint and valuation soar.

Still, the company has even more ambitious plans ahead, like a subscription program to let diners run their own "restaurants," an aggressive expansion in Texas and a potential initial public offering.

Created by serial entrepreneur Marc Lore in 2018, Wonder advertises itself as "the best restaurants from across the country, all in one place." Diners can place takeout or delivery orders from its food hall-style locations on the Wonder-branded app or third-party platforms, including Grubhub, which Wonder now owns.

As Lore described it to CNBC, "Wonder is a vertically integrated food technology platform to make great food more accessible." To achieve its goal, Wonder plans to open locations in urban, suburban and rural areas nationwide and aims to keep prices lower than the cost of delivered groceries. Thanks to its ownership of Grubhub, Wonder customers who order through the startup's app don't have to pay delivery fees, and its menu prices aren't inflated to cover the cost of commission fees to the delivery platform.

Plus, Wonder is automating some of its kitchen functions, like assembling salads and bowls and soon sauces and beverages.

The company aims for food preparation and delivery to be fully autonomous by 2040, Lore said.

Now, Wonder has to convince diners its platform built on cost savings and choice makes it worth their while in a competitive industry.

Lore's lofty vision for Wonder has helped the company raise $3.3 billion to date, from investors like DoorDash, Alphabet's venture arm and Gwyneth Paltrow. Its Series D fundraising round earlier this year raised its pre-money valuation to $9 billion — just under sandwich chain Subway's sale price two years ago.

Wonder's next pitch to investors could be on an IPO road show, assuming that the window for companies across industries to go public reopens in the coming months.

"[The mission] is really why I want to go public and raise the capital that it'll take to build that kind of generational business, also to have a public currency to be able to do more M&A," Lore said. "But I can't talk about timing." Lore's expertise lies in e-commerce, not restaurants.

lped found the parent company of Diapers.com and sold it in 2010 to Amazon for $545 million. Just six years later, Walmart paid about $3 billion for his follow-up venture, Jem. Lore stayed at the retailer until 2021 to accelerate Walmart's e-commerce growth.

Basketball fans might also recognize Lore as an owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves. In 2021, he and baseball legend Alex Rodriguez agreed to buy the team for $1.5 billion, although the deal was not finalized until 2025. Lore recently struck a deal to shrink his investment to a minority stake "to focus on his business," Rodriguez said in a statement in August, referring to Wonder.

Lore's latest startup began with the idea of bringing food delivery to consumers' homes through sprinter vans outfitted with mobile kitchens. The trucks lasted roughly two years before Wonder phased them out in favor of brick-and-mortar locations, which could serve more food options and lower costs. Lore's successful track record has helped him win over investors for Wonder.

"I joke around at GV that I do enterprise software investing, AI investing and anything that Marc Lore is running as an active CEO," said Dave Munichiello, managing partner of Alphabet's venture capital arm GV, who has known Lore since his Diapers.com days and invested in Jem through GV.

Lore himself thinks that his vision is the reason for Wonder's billions of dollars of funding.

"Everybody eats," he said. "It's defensible from AI." Wonder has spent more than $1 billion on acquisitions, not including the deals where financial details were not disclosed. Its purchases of Grubhub, delivery and logistics provider Relay, meal-kit provider Blue Apron and buzzy New York restaurant concepts have been expensive.

But Lore said he sees a "tremendous total addressable market" for Wonder if it's able to sell high-quality food at accessible prices, particularly in exurban and rural areas with few dining options beyond fast food and gas stations.

From Virginia to Massachusetts, 170 Wonder storefronts have appeared over the last three years. Next year, the company plans to enter Texas for the first time — with a goal of at least 100 locations in the state by the end of 2027.

Wonder prepares its food at commissary kitchens, then transports it to each individual location, where employees unseal, cook and finish the menu items. Its storefronts are all electric, without gas or venting, so Wonder can quickly move into a new space and cut down on renovations and red tape.

Its locations serve menu items from more than two dozen "restaurants," including Dabba Indian Kitchen, Tejas Barbecue and Pop Salad. Celebrity chefs including Bobby Flay, Michael Symon and Marcus Samuelsson receive up-front payments and equity in Wonder to let the company use their names for some of those concepts. More recent additions include acquisitions such as Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken and Salt Hank's, brands with established followings.

With its wide variety of options housed under one roof, Wonder has drawn comparisons to ghost kitchens, the once-buzzy startups without dine-in seating that flamed out as food delivery orders fell after the Covid pandemic. Once considered a potential disruptor to the restaurant industry, ghost kitchen companies such as Kitchen United have sought bankruptcy protection and wound down their operations. Lore disagrees with the comparison.

"You can see there's a front of house [in the] brick and mortar," he said. "You'll see people at lunchtime, sitting there enjoying lunch, so it's not ghost-y in that way. But I think it's also just in the fact that we're vertically integrated."

Wonder has never marketed itself as a ghost kitchen, instead calling itself "a new kind of food hall" or a "modern food court" before landing on a "vertically integrated food technology platform." Starting Nov. 17, the company plans to take the next step with Wonder Create. Influencers, entrepreneurs and brands can pay $10 a month to start their own "restaurant" based out of a Wonder location and earn a portion of the revenue from orders. Artificial intelligence will help them make their brand, including name, logo, pricing and recipes.

"It could be a restaurant for you and your friends, or you could be an influencer that has a following," Lore said.

He wants Wonder Create to democratize restaurant ownership — minus the capital, overhead costs or oversight of kitchen operations. The platform will eventually be available to the public, with users deciding menu items based on Wonder's pantry.

Besides Wonder Create, the company is also using AI for another initiative. MEL, a proprietary AI platform, can use a customer's health information, like data from an Oura ring or Whoop tracker or even blood biomarkers, to prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner for its user.

MEL is not currently available to Wonder customers, although Lore uses AI to advise his own meals, like the chicken muffin he ate for breakfast on a Tuesday in October.

While Wonder has won over venture capitalists, the battle for diners' stomachs and wallets is tougher.

Budget-conscious consumers have been dining out less often and becoming pickier when they do so. And while food delivery is still more popular than it was before the pandemic, consumers have pulled back on delivery orders compared with their Covid-era peak. Fees and high menu prices, which offset eateries' commission fees with apps, make delivery even more expensive than dining at a restaurant.

Plus, some consumers are skeptical about Wonder more specifically. Posts on social media decry the company's food quality and its funding from venture capital.

"It's OK, but it's just average," Amir Ings, a 27-year-old living in Philadelphia, said in a TikTok reviewing an order of three tacos from Wonder in late 2025. "My expectations were already in the gutter — it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it's still not great. And I paid like $16 for this, but it should have been no more than $8." Lore told CNBC that Wonder receives thousands of reviews every day from customers, rating the taste, temperature and portion size of their orders on a scale from 1 to 10. Wonder starts its board meetings by talking about taste scores, Munichiello said.

"We're maniacally focused on food quality .... We're constantly iterating on the meals that score lower, and see over time, the last 12 months, our taste scores have improved, our Google reviews have improved," Lore said. "I do expect food quality to improve as we scale, which is not always the case." Despite lackluster reviews on social media, Wonder has fans. Based on transaction data from Indagari, Wonder had a higher weighted average retention rate — how likely a diner is to return — and higher lifetime value — how much a customer has spent over time — than Cava and Sweetgreen.

Plus, Wonder has succeeded with locations in the most competitive markets for restaurants in the country.

"They made this company work well in the hardest place in the country to stand up this model: New York," Munichiello said. "You have so much choice in New York." Ultimately, Wonder wants to win over the rest of the U.S. — and public market investors.

In March, the company hired Gabrielle Scheibe Rabinovitch, previously at payment processor Worldpay, as its chief financial officer as it prepares to go public.

Lore declined to comment on the timing of a potential IPO to CNBC, although he has previously told Fortune that the company will be "ready and prepared to go public early next year." Since buying Blue Apron and Grubhub, Wonder has been operating at a financial loss, The Information previously reported. It plans to bring down the price of its meals by leaning into automation and drone delivery. In the long term, that plan could cut costs, although laying the groundwork won't be cheap.

In recent years, investors have grown less tolerant of startups pursuing growth at all costs, according to Avery Marquez, director of investment strategies at Renaissance Capital. To sway investors, unprofitable companies have to show they are taking steps toward profitability — or that the growth will continue long after the IPO.