Instacart, a US-based grocery delivery service, confirmed it had completed a $200m in a series E round. The round was led by investment manager Coatue Management and also featured growth equity firm Glade Brook Capital Partners as well as undisclosed existing investors. Instacart was reportedly valued at about $4.2bn.
Founded in 2012, Instacart is an online-based service which allows users to order groceries online from a range of local supermarkets and stores and have them delivered to their homes later on during the same day. Currently, the company has struck partnerships with more than 200 establishments across 190 US cities.
The round increased the company’s overall funding to approximately $911m, as the GCV Analytics chart below illustrates. It counts several corporates among its backers so far. In a $44m series B round from 2014, American Express Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of payment services firm American Express, invested. In 2015, it raised a $220m series C that was backed by mass media company Comcast’s corporate VC unit, Comcast Ventures. In 2016, grocery chain Whole Foods provided $36m.Later on, in 2017, Instacart raised $400m from a host of traditional VC investors. This also indirectly gave a stake to e-commerce firm Amazon, which acquired Whole Foods for $13.7bn in August 2017.
The grocery delivery space did pique corporate investors interest in 2015 but it the number of new publicly disclosed deals in such enterprises has been going down recently, as the historical bar chart here illustrates.
