Instacart sets IPO at $30 per share

Grocery-tech firm Instacart on Monday said it had chosen the high end of its initial public offering range, $30, and that it expected to start trading Tuesday on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CART.

Instacart offered 22 million shares, bringing in $660 million via its IPO and giving the company a fully diluted valuation of $9.9 billion.

That valuation is about a quarter of the $39 billion market value announced in early 2021.

Instacart’s IPO is scheduled to close Thursday.

PepsiCo., Inc. is a major backer, purchasing $175 million in stock.

MORE: Instacart’s path from startup to IPO

The San Francisco-based delivery company last week revised its share price, bumping it up to $28 to $30, up from earlier plans of $26 to $28.

Industry watchers surmised that Instacart’s confidence was influenced by the recent successful IPO of British chip design firm Arm Holdings, which priced shares at the top end of its range.

Instacart’s IPO filing came after a year of stops and starts. It confidentially filed go-public documents in May 2022, but CEO Fiji Simo shelved those plans less than six months later, saying the market was not friendly to tech IPOs.

The company, which was founded in 2012, now serves more than 85% of the U.S. grocery market, working with 1,400 retail banners of all sizes at more than 80,000 locations.

Simo, in the IPO filing, noted that she sees tremendous opportunity in digital grocery sales.

“As I write this, a massive digital transformation is underway in the grocery industry,” she wrote. “Grocery is the largest retail category and represents a $1.1 trillion industry in the United States alone. But only 12% of grocery sales are made online today. As even more people shop online, online penetration could double or more over time.”