Fortunately for Siegel, Berlin-based Delivery Hero has just scored a big one: a €40m ($49m) round that doubles the total capital it’s raised so far.

“It’s going to bring us profitability,” Siegel told me. “Right now we’re aggressively investing into our user-base. There may be one or two acquisitions.”

Organic growth is always ideally part of the plan in this game, but, given the need for speed, so is buying up smaller players. Just-Eat last bought someone in April, when the UK’s Fillmybelly.com became the company’s ninth acquisition since the start of 2011.

Delivery Hero’s last buy was that of Finland’s Pizza-online.fi back in late May. A couple of months before that it revealed both a €25m round and the purchase of the OnlinePizza Norden Group, which provided a strong foothold in Sweden, Finland, Austria and Poland.

So, before we take into account further acquisitions, where do the two rivals stand now?

London-based Just-Eat operates in 14 countries and said in May that it was partnering with 25,000 restaurants. Delivery Hero is a bit behind, with 12 countries and 22,000 partners under its belt.

But consider this: although it’s undeniably stepped up both its funding and acquisition game in the last two years, Just-Eat has been going for over a decade. Delivery Hero only came out of Team Europe’s stable in late 2010.

Siegel chalks the rapid growth up to Delivery Hero being “scrappy” and – crucially – not looking to float anytime soon.

“We’re very opportunistic compared to Just-Eat who want to go IPO – if you’re on the IPO track you have to be slower,” he suggested.

The latest wedge of cash to support this opportunism comes from Kreos Capital – which Seigel said would be able to provide “additional support for future growth” – and existing investors such as Kite Ventures.

“Since our first investment in Delivery Hero we have been impressed with the performance of the Delivery Hero team,” Kite’s Edward Shenderovich said in a statement. “The company has been growing rapidly into various markets. Now we [are] able to significantly increase our investment into Delivery Hero and provide sufficient capital to support this growth.”

UPDATE: This story originally said Delivery Hero was active in 11 countries and had 21,000 restaurants as partners. The company has now noted the addition of China to its roster in July, and says it has upped its partner base to 22,000.

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Rocket Internet, Team Europe and the Otto Group are duking it out in South-East Asia, Brazil, Russia and elsewhere. But moves into the U.S. market have been tentative at best.

Berlin-based Delivery Hero is an online food-ordering service that came out of Team Europe’s incubator. In less than two years, it’s rolled out to almost a dozen countries, from Australia to Mexico. Earlier this year it was talking 84 percent growth in one quarter.

We talked with Delivery Hero CEO Fabian Siegel about internationalization…

Meyer: Last time we checked, Delivery Hero was growing pretty fast…

Siegel: ”It’s built up much faster than any of us thought. We started the business with a focus on building a German market leader, and it really worked, so we doubled down on it. People have been doing [online food-ordering] for 12 years and it was too early, or too complicated, or the market was too small. But it’s a big market and it’s happening today. In the markets where we operate, 80 percent of people order food over the phone – the channel switch is just starting now. In three to five years, it will all be online.”

Are there cultural differences between markets that you have to take into account?

“We do see cultural differences in terms of where people order food and what they order. In general, people who have an elaborate food culture don’t tend to order so much food, such as Italy and France. It’s not whether online ordering is different, it’s whether food ordering is different. The U.S. is the country that has the biggest proportion of people ordering online.”

So are you planning to go into the U.S. market?

“It’s a very bold play. You have three players there – LivingSocial, Seamless and GrubHub – and right now we see we can deploy our capital more efficiently elsewhere. We see ourselves competing with Just-Eat – we only overlap with them in the UK and Switzerland. In the UK, we’re growing rapidly. We bought HungryHouse.co.uk when it had 3,000 restaurants. Now they have 7,000. What took them three years to build took us six months to double.”

What’s the key to getting restaurants on board more quickly than your rivals can?

“We’re doing it over the phone. You can call more people than try to meet them.”

Do companies such as yours try to get restaurants into exclusive arrangements?

“People sometimes try it, but we don’t think it’s OK for the restaurant. Restaurants hate it; they feel like you’re trying to force them into something.

“It’s a land grab. It’s about being faster and able to raise a lot of capital quickly. In each market, we’re either number one or two – in Sweden, Finland, Austria and Poland we’re dominant, and in other markets like Germany and the UK we’re strong number two. Other markets are too early.”

I’m getting a strong sense these days that, particularly in e-commerce, certain German companies are becoming very expansionist. Rocket Internet, for sure; Team Europe; Delivery Hero… is that the case?

“We’re in the second or third generation of internet startups here. The Samwers started Alando first only in Germany. You’d always start with one country, and when you’re done there, you want new challenges. The new startups are immediately global.

“Berlin has built an infrastructure of massive customisation. It’s not just Rocket etc – Fab.com and Airbnb use Berlin as their hub for a global rollout. There’s a uniqueness the city has to offer in terms of talent and close communication, and you have the experience. People here have already launched in South-East Asia; they can do it with another business model.

“You don’t see another hub in the world where this is being done repeatedly. It’s great for us to hire people from Rocket or Zalando who’ve done it before. You don’t see that in any other European capital, or in the U.S. – the U.S. is a huge market, so why take the risk [of international expansion]?”

So, in e-commerce, is it shaping up to be about the U.S. market and the non-U.S. market, with companies such as yours opting for the latter?

“We have opportunities in the U.S., but there’s already three big players. There are so many markets where the only competitors are local players with no access to capital.

“For U.S. companies, why bother getting distracted by something outside the U.S.? They leave the rest of the world open, and naturally companies take it. Most of them happen to be Berlin-based companies. This is primarily for e-commerce companies – I mean, look at SoundCloud.”

You returned a couple of years ago from an eight-year stint in the U.S. How does the difference strike you?

“When I left in 2002, there was no Berlin scene. There were more startups in other cities in Germany, and there was no European hub for startups. Eight years later, Berlin is the hub for Germany and on a European scale it’s one of the – if not the – places people start up. Again, look at SoundCloud. It’s the combination of cheap cost of living, and a city that feels like Brooklyn a big – it’s not so dense.

“You can attract talent from around the world that come here with no big risk. It’s very well-connected from a travel perspective – all these budget airlines really help the European startup scene. You have capital based in London, talent from Eastern Europe, and at some point you get this critical mass of people working with the industry. For that I’d give Rocket a lot of credit – these guys created the talent pool. 15,000 employees – they trained these people how to build web companies. It wasn’t there when I left.”

That said, is there a risk of a Berlin hype bubble?

“I don’t see a bubble here. Access to capital is still very restricted here, which reduces the risk of a bubble. You don’t have a real angel network. The problem here is that people can come up with the first €50k, then there’s this funding gap. I don’t know when we might get there, because we don’t have the exits here.

“There’s no true venture capital in Europe – VC involves taking risks. In the U.S., VC firms are investing into tech teams – here they’re only investing in e-commerce because they think they understand it.

“Incubators fill the gap here. In the U.S. they don’t need that, because they have enough capital. That’s the biggest difference I’ve seen – here you have institutionalised entrepreneurship, incubators, whereas in the U.S. you just have entrepreneurship. Delivery Hero was built out of Team Europe. It was a luxury, in that you can just focus on building the business.”

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The company, which trades under the name Lieferheld at home and Delivery Hero across the rest of Europe, said on Tuesday that it grew 84 percent in the first quarter of this year and is now the market-leading online service for take-out in Germany, Poland, Austria, Switzerland and Finland.

We like to hear real numbers, and Delivery Hero’s happy to, er, deliver. Customers? More than four million. Affiliate restaurants and delivery services? 19,000. Global revenues? On target for a cool €250 million-plus this year — that’s $320 million — around two-thirds of which is coming from outside Germany.

Here’s a graph showing that growth:

“We are currently one of the fastest-growing companies in the world,” co-CEO Fabian Siegel boasted in a statement. And the company’s not done yet.

Lukas Jaworski of investors Team Europe told me Delivery Hero’s HungryHouse.co.uk was now a “strong number two” in the UK, aiming to overtake the well-funded market leader Just-Eat within the next 12 months. “We had enormous growth in the [UK] in the last weeks,” he added.

Other markets the company is targeting include Sweden, Russia, Australia and Mexico.

Of course, all this expansion takes cash, and the company says it’s taken in €40 million ($51 million) in funding since it started in October 2010, from runet, e-Tengelmann, Kite Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, Point Nine Capital and Team Europe.

So what’s next? Jaworski gnomically hints at a launch in a new country during the third quarter of this year, but there’s little more to go on.

Wherever that launch will be, it seems that Delivery Hero is approaching a key threshold. After all, it’s not really a new idea to act as a hub for food delivery services, but once you’ve got enough brand recognition and scale, you become a natural choice of partner for the vendors.

Particularly with the advent of smartphone apps (Delivery Hero offers them for Android and iPhone, naturally), now’s as good a time as ever to become the big beast. Delivery Hero just needs to hit those targets and maintain its pace to be in with a chance.

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An intriguing row has broken out which has led to police investigating the management of one such firm, following complaints of a “cyberattack” by a rival.

Lieferando, the smaller of the two firms, saw its systems fall prey to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack early last December. On the second day of the disruption, CEO Jörg Gerbig told me today, Lieferando filed a complaint against an “unknown party” and handed over its logfiles to the police.

It emerged on Sunday that, after four months of investigations, the police visited rival Lieferheld’s Berlin offices in connection with the attack. The company’s management is now under suspicion but, according to Der Spiegel, Lieferheld MD Fabian Siegel has described the idea of his company attacking a smaller rival as “totally absurd”.

Siegel also provided a possible explanation for Lieferando’s server logs pointing to Lieferheld. He said his company uses web crawlers to scan its rivals’ sites, in an attempt to compare their claims of restaurant affiliate numbers with the reality.

Cyberattack or harmless probe?

This, apparently, is standard practice. However, in a statement given to Deutsche Startups, Gerbig said such web crawling would not have been enough to knock over Lieferando’s systems.

The whole business has pretty much descended into name-calling, with Lieferando claiming industrial sabotage, and Lieferheld using the opportunity to question its rival’s honesty in reporting its own success.

I asked Lieferando to respond to the claim that the crawlers may have brought its servers down, but was told only that “we have to wait and see what police investigations bring to light”. No further comment was given, as it’s an ongoing investigation.

At least Lieferando is talking. I’ve tried multiple times to get in touch with Lieferheld over the accusations, but have had no reply.

I get the suspicion that we’ll be hearing more about this case in future.

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