Instacart, the US-based grocery delivery service that counts corporates Amazon, Comcast and American Express as investors, raised $200m in financing yesterday at a $17.7bn post-money valuation.
Private equity fund Valiant Peregrine Fund and investment firm D1 Capital Partners co-led the round, which boosted Instacart’s overall funding to about $2.4bn.
Instacart runs an online platform that allows users to order groceries and other consumer items to be picked up from local shops and delivered by the company’s shoppers. It has more than 500 retail partners and sources items from some 40,000 retail locations in North America.
The company’s user numbers have soared amidst the coronavirus lockdown and social distancing measures, and the valuation represents a 28% jump from July this year when investment manager T. Rowe Price added $100m to push a funding round to $325m.
DST Global, General Catalyst and D1 Capital Partners had supplied the first $225m the previous month, after Instacart closed a series F round featuring D1 Capital, Valiant Capital, Tiger Global Management and Coatue Management and Valiant Capital at $871m in November 2018.
The series F funding was raised at a $7bn pre-money valuation and came seven months after the company completed a $350m series E round that included Coatue Management, Glade Brook Capital Partners and unnamed existing investors, valuing it at nearly $4.4bn post-money.
Sequoia Capital led Instacart’s $400m series D round the year before, investing with Valiant Capital, Wellcome Trust, Y Combinator Continuity, Andreessen Horowitz, FundersClub, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Initialized Capital and Thrive Capital.
Whole Foods, the grocery chain since acquired by e-commerce group Amazon, invested $36m in the company in 2016 at a $2bn valuation.
Instacart had secured $220m from mass media group Comcast’s investment arm, Comcast Ventures, as well as KPCB, Thrive Capital, Valiant Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Aaron Levie and Sam Altman the previous year.
American Express Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of payment services provider American Express, had joined Sequoia Capital, Canaan Partners, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and various individuals in a $44m series B round in 2014.
Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and Canaan Partners were all existing Instacart investors, and its earlier backers included SV Angel and angel investor Paul Buchheit.
