Apoorva Mehta

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Instacart raises $200M more at a $17.7B valuation

Instacart announced today that it has raised $200 million in a new funding round featuring prior investors. D1 Capital and Valiant Peregrine Fund led the investment. Instacart is now worth $17.7 billion, post-money, or $17.5 billion pre-money. The plan is to use the funding to focus on introducing new features and tools to improve the customer experience, and further support Instacart’s enterprise and ads businesses, according to a blog post.

Previously in 2020, Instacart raised $100 million in July, and $225 million in June. The June round valued the company at around $13.7 billion, meaning that the unicorn’s new funding round — raised just months later — came at a much higher price.

Instacart, like some other tech, and tech-enabled businesses, has seen demand for its service expand during the pandemic. It’s not hard to trace a connection between COVID-19 and its business results, as folks wanting to stay at home have turned to on-demand services to keep themselves safe.

The growth shown by Uber’s food delivery business is another example of this trend.

Instacart’s valuation has more than doubled since its 2018 Series F, when it was worth around $7.9 billion. The pace at which Instacart has created paper value is impressive, though its IPO plans appear murky from the outside and how much of its COVID-bump will be retained when the pandemic ends is not yet clear.

The startup famously turned a profit during a month in Q2, worth around $10 million per The Information. The same report indicated that Instacart lost around $300 million in 2019. What the company’s full-year profitability profile will look like is not known.

TechCrunch sent a number of questions to the firm, including if it has had any further profitable months in 2020, and how quickly it grew in Q3 2020. The company’s spokespeople did not answer those questions.

“Today’s investment is a testament to the strong conviction our existing investors have in the strength of our teams and the important role Instacart plays for customers, partners, and the entire grocery ecosystem,” Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said in a press release. “I’m incredibly proud of our team’s work to scale our business this past year and rise to meet the unprecedented consumer demand and growth.”

Instacart is one of the company’s caught up in a regulatory war after California passed AB5, which changed the state’s rules on gig workers. A voter proposition — Prop 22 — that would keep rideshare drivers and delivery workers classified as independent contractors, is coming up for a vote in California. Instacart is in favor of the proposition, along with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates (now owned by Uber).

Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash have collectively contributed $184,008,361.46 to the Yes on 22 campaign. Those contributions have been monetary, non-monetary and have come in the form of loans. In September, the four companies each committed another $17.5 million to Yes on Prop 22 in monetary contributions. Of all the measures on this November’s ballot, Yes on Prop 22 has received the most contributions, according to California’s Fair Political Practices Commission.

Beyond Prop 22, Instacart is facing a lawsuit from Washington, D.C. District Attorney General Karl A. Racine that alleges the company charged customers millions of dollars in “deceptive service fees” and failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of sales tax. The suit seeks restitution for customers who paid those service fees, as well as back taxes and interest on taxes owed to D.C. Specifically, it alleges Instacart misled customers regarding the 10% service fee to think it was a tip for the delivery person, from September 2016 to April 2018.

Meanwhile, amid the pandemic and wildfires in California, workers have demanded personal protective equipment and better pay, and, most recently, disaster relief.

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Instacart raises another $600M at a $7.6B valuation

Instacart chief executive officer Apoorva Mehta wants every household in the U.S. to use Instacart, a grocery delivery service that allows shoppers to order from more than 300 retailers, including Kroger, Costco, Walmart and Sam’s Club, using its mobile app.

Today, the company is taking a big leap toward that goal.

San Francisco-based Instacart has raised $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation, just six months after it brought in a $150 million round and roughly eight months after a $200 million financing that valued the business at $4.2 billion.

D1 Capital Partners, a relatively new fund led by Daniel Sundheim, the former chief investment officer of Viking Global Investors, led the round.

Instacart is raking in cash aggressively but spending it cautiously. The company still has all of its Series E, which ultimately totaled $350 million, and the majority of its $413 million Series D in the bank, a source close to the company told TechCrunch. That means, in total, Instacart has $1.2 billion at its fingertips. Currently, according to the same source, the company is only profitable on a contribution margin basis, meaning it’s earning a profit on each individual Instacart order.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Mehta said the company didn’t need the capital and that it was an “opportunistic” round, i.e. the capital was readily available and Instacart has ambitious plans to scale, so why not fundraise. Instacart plans to use the enormous pool of capital to double its engineering team by 2019, which will include filling 300 open engineering roles in its recently announced Toronto office, he said.

As far as an initial public offering, it will happen — eventually.

“It will be on the horizon,” Mehta told TechCrunch.

“2018 has been a really big year for us,” he added. “The reason why we are so excited is because the opportunity ahead of us is enormous. The U.S. is a $1 trillion grocery market and less than 5 percent of that is bought online. It’s an enormous category that’s highly under-penetrated.”

In the last six months, Instacart has announced a few notable accomplishments.

As of August, the service has been available to 70 percent of U.S. households. That’s due to the expansion of existing partnerships and new deals entirely, like a recently announced pilot program between Instacart and Walmart Canada that gives Canadian Instacart users access to 17 different Walmart locations across Winnipeg and Toronto, Ontario.

The company has also completed several executive hires. Most recently, it tapped former Thumbtack chief technology officer Mark Schaaf as CTO. Before that, Instacart brought on David Hahn as chief product officer and Dani Dudeck as its first chief communications officer.

In early September, the company confirmed its chief growth officer Elliot Shmukler would be leaving the company.

The six-year-old Y Combinator graduate has raised more than $1.6 billion in venture capital funding from Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Canaan Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and several others.

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Instacart reverses course, re-introducing tips for shoppers

instacart-thumb Under pressure from shoppers complaining about losing the ability to receive tips last month as the company looked to smooth out the earnings curve, Instacart said it is re-introducing customer tipping. “After announcing this change, we heard a lot of feedback from our shopper community,” the company said in a blog post. “While our shoppers liked most of the changes, they did… Read More

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How Apoorva Mehta hopes to build an Instacart empire with a promoted ad business

disrupt_sf16_apoorva_mehta-4077 Instacart is one of the most well-known companies in what can be an extremely difficult on-demand delivery economy. It’s known for being one of the pioneers of a new age of online grocery delivery, especially in light of the previous failure of companies like Webvan, but it’s going to have a long uphill battle to profitability and sustainability. Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta,… Read More

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