Report: Instacart nears launch of IPO

Instacart reportedly may get under way with its long-awaited initial public offering as soon as next week.

According to Bloomberg.com, an unnamed source said the grocery and retail delivery giant is set to file for a traditional IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and aims to launch an offering on the Nasdaq as early as September.

An Instacart spokesperson declined to comment on the report in an email to Winsight Grocery Business.

If San Francisco-based Instacart does begin the process of going public, it would mark the e-commerce technology company's second attempt.  

In May 2022, Instacart filed paperwork with the SEC to initiate an IPO, but market conditions and a plummeting valuation postponed that effort. Later, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo told employees in October that it was “highly unlikely” that an IPO would occur in 2022. 

A Wall Street Journal report at the time quoted a letter from Simo to Instacart employees noting that the market for new IPOs “remain closed.” According to the Journal's article, she said, “We do not need a perfect market, we’re just looking for an open market window.”

More recently, the IPO path for Instacart has been paved by a resurgent valuation, which reportedly stood at about $40 billion in March 2022. That internal valuation had dropped to just over a quarter of its value by October, according to a New York Times report, which put Instacart’s value at $13 billion. By December, that number dropped further to $10 billion but rebounded to $18 billion by April. 

Instacart has worked to bolster its e-commerce technology stack and reestablish itself in a post-pandemic market, where inflation-weary shoppers are less inclined to rely on delivery services.

The same-day delivery service launched Instacart Business in February, which caters to customers purchasing office supplies. In the same month, Instacart released a number of services for independent grocers, enabling them to customize ads and more. And in March, the company announced it is working with ChatGPT to develop an AI-powered chatbot. They soft-launched the technology in April.

* This story was updated to clarify the source of the Bloomberg article.