Maplebear Inc. (Instacart)

What does Maplebear Inc. own?

The Instacart marketplace and its product lines: Instacart Business, Instacart Ads and Carrot Ads, Storefront enterprise software, and the wound-down Caper hardware unit.

Is Maplebear publicly traded?

Yes, under NASDAQ ticker CART since September 2023. Its shares remain listed until the pending DoorDash acquisition closes.

Who owns Instacart?

Maplebear Inc., a public company owned by institutional and retail shareholders, currently operates Instacart independently. DoorDash has agreed to acquire it for approximately $17 billion pending approvals.

Why is the company called Maplebear?

Maplebear is the legal name chosen at incorporation and retained at IPO; the company does business entirely as Instacart.

Where is Instacart headquartered?

San Francisco, California, USA.

How does Instacart make money?

Through customer fees and retailer commissions on orders (about 70 percent of revenue) plus advertising, retail media, and enterprise software (about 30 percent, growing faster).

Apoorva Mehta started Instacart in 2012 in San Francisco after more than a dozen failed startup ideas, co-founding with Max Mullen and Brandon Leonardo. The model inverted the era's grocery-delivery logic: rather than warehouses and inventory, Instacart dispatched gig workers into existing supermarkets to pick and deliver orders.

Growth was steady through the mid-2010s on partnerships with Costco, Kroger, and regional chains, with hundreds of millions in venture funding from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.

The pandemic was transformative. Order volume surged as lockdowns pushed grocery online, and a March 2021 round valued the company at $39 billion. Fidji Simo, recruited from Meta in 2021, built the advertising business that became Instacart's profit engine.

The September 2023 IPO priced at $30 per share, a $10 billion valuation far below the private peak but with genuine GAAP profitability, a rarity among gig platforms. Post-IPO, the company expanded enterprise offerings (Storefront e-commerce tools, Caper smart carts, Carrot Ads retail-media software) and AI solutions for grocers.

Leadership turned over in August 2025 when Simo departed for OpenAI and longtime executive Chris Rogers became CEO. Two October 2026 decisions defined the endgame: on October 25 the board approved winding down the Caper smart-cart hardware business, and on October 29 the company signed the DoorDash agreement, a $17 billion transaction that, if cleared, represents a remarkable exit above the IPO price though below the 2021 private valuation.

Maplebear's sustainability profile is limited: marketplace logistics means a distributed gig-driver fleet with no owned vehicles to decarbonize, and published ESG reporting is modest. The company highlights SNAP/EBT online payment access, which opened grocery delivery to government-assistance households in most states, and food-access partnerships with Feeding America members. Its central ethical exposure is gig-worker classification and pay transparency rather than environmental metrics.

Gig-labor classification is Maplebear's persistent legal theme: a $46.5 million settlement resolved San Diego worker-classification claims under California law, while Proposition 22 largely preserved contractor status for shoppers. Tip and fee transparency faced repeated criticism through 2020 until policy changes separated tips from base pay. The pending DoorDash merger invites the largest regulatory challenge in company history: combining the top two U.S. delivery platforms will draw federal and possibly state antitrust review, with completion timing uncertain as of November 2026. The Caper wind-down, coming weeks before the deal announcement, marked a quiet admission that the hardware diversification had not worked.