Instacart Continues Funding Spree, Raises $600 Million
The grocery-delivery startup bagged nearly $1 billion from investors this year.
InstaCart employees fulfill orders for delivery at a Whole Foods Market Inc. store in Los Angeles, California.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
When Amazon.com Inc. bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion last year, anyone watching grocery-delivery upstart Instacart Inc. was just about ready to stick a fork in it. But the San Francisco-based startup maintained a more optimistic outlook. It said competition from Jeff Bezos’s e-commerce behemoth would actually help it grow.
Now, it looks like Instacart may have been right—or at least, the naysayers were wrong. On Tuesday, the company said it had raised $600 million in new funding, a capstone to a remarkable year. In the last eight months, the startup increased the number of grocery retailers on its platform by 50 percent to 300 and raised close to $1 billion from investors.