Instacart

Corporate history

After getting inspiration from being low on groceries without owning a car as well as his trips to the grocery store by bus in the cold while growing up in Canada, Apoorva Mehta founded Instacart in 2012 at age 26. He tried to apply for funding through Y Combinator but missed the deadline. He eventually got a meeting by using the Instacart mobile app to deliver a six-pack of beer from 21st Amendment Brewery to a Y Combinator partner and was admitted to the summer of 2012 batch. Y Combinator helped Mehta raise $2.3 million in funding and enabled him to meet his two co-founders, Max Mullen and Brandon Leonardo. The company’s name is a combination of "maple," in reference to Canada, and "bear," for the logo on the California state flag, as Mehta grew up in Canada and moved to California.

At the end of 2018, Instacart changed its pay system for its personal shoppers. Shoppers reported frustration with the new payment system.

In 2019, the company expanded its services to offering an on-demand option for its shoppers, in order to allow shoppers to work more flexible schedules.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Instacart implemented contactless delivery, safety kits and guidelines for shoppers. From mid-March to mid-April 2020, as a result of a surge in usage of the mobile app, Instacart signed up an additional 300,000 shoppers to meet the surge in demand for grocery deliveries.

In 2021, Instacart had a valuation of $39 billion. In July 2021, Fidji Simo was appointed CEO, while Mehta transitioned to Executive Chairman of the Board. In July 2022, Simo was appointed to succeed Mehta as chairperson once the company completed its initial public offering. In September 2023, the company became public through an initial public offering raising $660 million, valuing the company at about $10 billion. The company's shares opened on Nasdaq at a price of $30. Mehta left the company after it went public. In 2025, Instacart unveiled its first Super Bowl ad.

In May 2025, TechCrunch and others reported that Simo would leave Instacart to take a role with OpenAI. Later that month the company appointed business chief, Chris Rogers, as its next CEO beginning in August 2025. On August 15, 2025, Chris Rogers officially stepped into the position of CEO and joined the company's Board of Directors.

In December 2025, Instacart agreed to pay $60 million to settle an investigation opened by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) related to allegations the company had deceived consumers about its Instacart+ membership and free delivery offers, according to court documents. An Instacart spokesperson said the company flatly denied any allegations of wrongdoing, and that the settlement allows the company to focus on shoppers and retailers.

2010s

Instacart was first launched in San Francisco in 2012. In November 2013, Instacart added alcohol delivery in areas where alcohol delivery was legal. The company expanded across the United States in the following years.

Labor practices and legal issues

Workforce

Instacart has approximately 600,000 shoppers on their platform. Instacart shoppers are independent contractors, and the majority of shoppers shop less than 10 hours per week. In June 2015, Instacart began hiring some shoppers as part-time employees, known as in-store shoppers, starting with Chicago and Boston and extending to shoppers in Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C. the following month.

In January 2021, the company announced plans to lay off nearly 2,000 in-store employees. Instacart said that the layoffs were due to stores increasingly using Instacart to have consumers place orders, but have their own employees fulfill the order instead of Instacart's workforce, reducing reliance on Instacart's in-store shoppers.

Worker classification

In March 2017, Instacart agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a class action settlement stemming from the alleged misclassification of its personal shoppers as independent contractors. The suit, filed in March 2015, alleged 18 violations, including improper tip pooling and failure to reimburse workers for business expenses.

In February 2020, 15 Instacart in-store shoppers in Skokie, Illinois voted to form a trade union.

COVID-19 response

In March 2020, shoppers impacted by COVID-19 would be eligible for up to 14 days of sick pay. Instacart required that workers either get a positive COVID-19 test or be under a mandatory quarantine by a public health or other government agency. Workers demanded hazard pay and personal protective equipment. In early April 2020, Instacart began providing safety kits to workers. In June, Instacart changed its sick leave in an agreement reached by it and the D.C. Attorney General, Karl Racine. Under the agreement, Instacart provided paid leave to workers who were clinically diagnosed with COVID-19 by a doctor or other medical professional along with those who had a household member contract COVID-19. The agreement also provided workers access to telemedicine services. In January 2021, Instacart announced a $25 stipend to provide financial assistance to company shoppers who choose to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

2020 customer data exposure

In July 2020 data tied to an estimated 278,531 Instacart accounts - names, partial addresses, the last four digits of payment cards and recent order histories - was reported for sale on dark-web marketplaces. Instacart denied any breach of its systems, attributed the exposure to credential stuffing and forced password resets, security researchers and customers interviewed by TechCrunch said the data looked genuine. Instacart did not offer two-factor authentication at the time.