Instacart: What It Does, Who Runs It, Funding and News

Instacart is a grocery technology company that lets people order from local stores for delivery or pickup, and sells the software behind that service to the retailers themselves. Its registered name is Maplebear Inc., its shares have traded on Nasdaq under the symbol CART since September 2023, and its 2025 annual report calls it a technology and enablement partner for the grocery industry.

Instacart has had three chief executives since 2012, and in 2025 it changed both its CEO and its chair. What follows is the company's basic record: key facts, products, executives, private funding and IPO, and what it has announced since spring 2025.

Instacart key facts

YC's company page lists a team size of 3,000. The annual report's figure of about 3,600 full-time employees is the later, formal count.

What Instacart does

Instacart works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores, according to its second-quarter 2026 release. Customers order through the Instacart app or website and a shopper picks and delivers the order; the company's about page cites about 600,000 shoppers. It operates in the United States and Canada, where it expanded in 2017. Its business has four main parts:

• Instacart Marketplace. The consumer app and website, plus Instacart+, a paid membership with $0 delivery fees on orders over a set size (Form 10-K).
• Enterprise technology for retailers. Storefront, which the 10-K says powers more than 380 grocers' own e-commerce sites, and in-store tools such as Caper Carts, which the company is now winding down, and FoodStorm. Costco became the first Storefront Pro customer outside North America, in France and Spain, per the Q4 2025 letter.
• Instacart Ads. Advertising for consumer brands, with over 9,000 active brands at the end of 2025 (Form 10-K).
• AI shopping tools. An AI assistant in pilot that helps customers build baskets, and an integration with Google Gemini through AI Mode in Google Search, both listed in the Q2 2026 release.

A few retailers carry much of the business: the 10-K says the top three accounted for about 43% of gross transaction value (GTV), the total value of orders placed, in 2025.

Full-year figures come from the Q4 2025 shareholder letter of February 2026, quarterly figures from the Q2 2026 release of August 6, 2026. Instacart has scheduled its third-quarter 2026 results for November 5, 2026.

Who runs Instacart

Chris Rogers is CEO, President and Chair of the board. He was Chief Business Officer before the board named him CEO effective August 15, 2025, according to the 2026 proxy statement, and he became Chair on November 24, 2025 (8-K). The proxy, filed April 9, 2026, lists these executive officers:

Ravi Gupta is the board's Lead Independent Director, per the same proxy.

Earlier leaders. Apoorva Mehta led Instacart as CEO from its founding until Fidji Simo, a former head of the Facebook app, took over on August 2, 2021; Mehta became executive chairman (Retail Dive). In July 2022 Mehta said he would leave the board once Instacart became a public company, with Simo to become chair (Grocery Dive). Simo told the board on May 7, 2025 that she intended to resign as CEO to pursue another opportunity, staying on as Chair (8-K); she stepped down as CEO on August 15, 2025 (8-K) and left the board in November 2025 (8-K).

Instacart funding history and IPO

Instacart raised venture money for about a decade before its September 2023 initial public offering. The table lists selected rounds whose amount and valuation were published, and the IPO.

TechCrunch reported two further 2020 raises before the October round: $225 million in June at about $13.7 billion and $100 million in July.

Instacart news, 2025 to 2026

• May 7, 2025: CEO Fidji Simo told the board she intended to resign as CEO, staying on as Chair (8-K).
• August 15, 2025: Chris Rogers became CEO and President, and Josh Silverman joined the board (8-K).
• November 24, 2025: Rogers was named Chair after Simo resigned from the board (8-K).
• December 18, 2025: The FTC announced that Instacart would pay $60 million in consumer refunds to settle a lawsuit alleging deceptive claims about free delivery, its "100% satisfaction guarantee" and Instacart+ free trials (FTC). The FTC describes these as allegations.
• December 22, 2025: Instacart ended all item price tests on its platform, run with its Eversight pricing tool, after a study led by Consumer Reports found different prices for the same item at the same store (BNN Bloomberg).
• February 12, 2026: Full-year 2025 results: GTV of $37.2 billion and revenue of $3.7 billion (Q4 2025 letter).
• July 16, 2026: Instacart acquired Arpalus, a computer vision company that identifies products on store shelves; terms were not disclosed (Supermarket News).
• August 6, 2026: Second-quarter GTV rose 14% to $10.4 billion (Q2 2026 release).
• October 25, 2026: The board decided to wind down Caper Cart operations, expecting pre-tax charges of about $55 million to $80 million, mostly in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the wind-down substantially complete by the end of the second quarter of 2027 (8-K).

For DoorDash, another large U.S. delivery company, see its dossier.