LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Deliveroo boss Will Shu has had a mixed week. Shares in the food delivery group he founded in 2013 are set to start trading on Wednesday with a 7.6 billion pound valuation, one of the largest listings by a British company in recent years. However, the price is at the bottom of the original target range. Doubts over the loss-making company’s post-pandemic growth and its hunger for cash have spoiled investors’ appetites. Deliveroo’s ubiquitous drivers have become indispensable during lockdowns, introducing new customers to the convenience of ordering food on their smartphones. Revenue surged 58% to 1.2 billion pounds in 2020, while gross profit rose 89% to 357 million pounds. Deliveroo’s ambitions don’t stop there, though: it’s also handling groceries and hosting kitchens which only make home-delivered food. Even so, the business faces multiple questions. The first is whether Deliveroo can maintain its growth when restaurants reopen and diners are no longer confined to their homes. The second is whether its bottom line will continue to improve: the company spent less on sales and marketing last year as many restaurants closed following the initial outbreak of Covid-19. Finally, Deliveroo’s model of treating drivers as third-party contractors rather than employees is in serious doubt. Legal and regulatory provisions, mainly related to claims from drivers, have cost it over 100 million pounds in the past three years. Besides, new shareholders are hardly getting a bargain. After deducting cash proceeds, Deliveroo’s enterprise value will be just over 6 billion pounds, around 10 times its expected gross profit in 2022, using Morningstar estimates. That’s ahead of larger European rival Just Eat Takeaway.com, which trades on around 8 times, but behind Frankfurt-listed Delivery Hero, which is pushing into earlier-stage food delivery markets in the Middle East and Asia. Deliveroo’s continued appetite for cash is also hardly reassuring. The company is raising an additional pot of almost 1 billion pounds in the offering, not far off the total amount of equity it has raised in its eight-year existence. That suggests Shu is planning lots of new investments, or else preparing for an extended price war. It’s less than a year since UK competition regulators reluctantly waved through Amazon.com’s investment in Deliveroo, arguing that the British company’s financial future would otherwise be in doubt. Shu has delivered a remarkable turnaround. Even so, new investors are right to avoid over-ordering.