Maplebear Inc., doing business as Instacart, is a diversified technology business that operates a technology platform that enables connections and transactions primarily among retailers, end users, advertisers, and shoppers primarily throughout the United States and Canada.
End users are provided the ability to transact with retailers for grocery and non-grocery items and with shoppers to pick and deliver the items on the end user’s behalf. Retailers contract with the company to have their good...
Maplebear Inc., doing business as Instacart, is a diversified technology business that operates a technology platform that enables connections and transactions primarily among retailers, end users, advertisers, and shoppers primarily throughout the United States and Canada.
End users are provided the ability to transact with retailers for grocery and non-grocery items and with shoppers to pick and deliver the items on the end user’s behalf. Retailers contract with the company to have their goods available for search, selection, and purchase, generally for a percentage of the total purchase value from the sale of goods, on a fee per transaction basis, or some combination thereof. Advertisers have the opportunity to purchase Sponsored Product ads, display ads, coupons, and a variety of other online advertising services. Shoppers, who are independent contractors, pick and deliver orders using the company’s technology platform for fulfillment or delivery service opportunities primarily on a fee per batch basis. The company also sells software-as-a-service offerings primarily targeted at retailers and charges fees for such offerings.
The company partners with retailers to help them successfully navigate the digital transformation of their businesses.
The company wants to enable any retailer, large or small, to drive success both online and in-store and serve their customers better in all of the ways they choose to shop. The company has demonstrated its ability to help its retail partners drive strong growth and stay competitive in a complex and increasingly digital industry.
Instacart invented a new model for online grocery shopping by offering consumers on-demand delivery from the stores they know and trust. Retailers reach customers through both Instacart Marketplace, where customers can shop from their favorite retailers through the company’s app or website, and retailers’ owned and operated online storefronts that are powered by Instacart Enterprise Platform, its end-to-end technology solution encompassing e-commerce, fulfillment, Connected Stores, ads and marketing, and insights.
Instacart started as a way for households to conveniently manage their weekly grocery shopping, a recurring and high order value consumer use case. Customers can place orders for delivery or pickup across a variety of use cases, including the weekly shop, bulk stock-up, convenience, special occasions, from restaurants, and using the company’s in-store technologies.
As consumers and retailers move online, brands can use Instacart Ads as an effective way to reach customers at the point of purchase and within minutes of delivery and consumption. Instacart Ads offers brands a highly measurable ads offering that leverages first-party transaction data to move products off of store shelves more efficiently.
Instacart is built for the entire grocery ecosystem, improving the experiences for each of the company’s constituents and helping them succeed:
Retailers: The company enables more than 1,800 retail banners as of December 31, 2024, to grow by providing technology that can accelerate the digital transformation of their entire business both online and in-store.
Customers: As of December 31, 2024, the company reached 98% of households in North America, and helps its customers shop at their favorite retailers, order from their favorite restaurants, and enjoy selection, quality, affordability, and convenience. The company’s membership program, Instacart+, offers expanded customer benefits, including unlimited $0 delivery fees on orders over a certain size, and other exclusive benefits.
Brands: The company represents one of the largest and fast growing e-commerce channels for brands. The company provides discovery and attractive return on investment for over 7,000 active brands through its industry-leading advertising tools and insights purpose-built for the online grocery category. The company estimates that on average, its ads deliver more than a 15% incremental sales lift, and in some cases twice that, for its brand partners.
Shoppers: As of December 31, 2024, the company offers approximately 600,000 shoppers an immediate, flexible earnings opportunity that allows them to choose when and how much to work. Shoppers are deeply valued members of the Instacart community, and the company strives to make the shopping experience as seamless as possible, and protect shoppers while they work, so they can continue to deliver superior customer service. The company offers shoppers a mobile application (iOS and Android) that powers the entire shopper experience seamlessly.
Instacart Technology
The company built Instacart to serve the entire grocery ecosystem. The key pillars of the company's technology are Instacart Marketplace, Instacart Enterprise Platform, and Instacart Ads. The company's solutions are underpinned by a shared foundation of technology, infrastructure, data insights, and fulfillment that leverages its scale and expertise specific to the grocery category. The company's technology solutions are better together. Since its founding, Instacart has powered more than one billion orders. The company's technology and data insights drive efficiencies for retailers, customers, brands, and shoppers.
Instacart Marketplace
Through Instacart Marketplace, the company helps customers find their favorite products, provides an innovative ad offering that inspires people to try new brands, connects customers to its dedicated shopper community, and helps retailers and customers build deeper relationships. The company helps retailers in serving their customers’ needs regarding how and where they want to shop by supporting a wide array of fulfillment options, shopping occasions, and categories.
Instacart Enterprise Platform
Instacart Enterprise Platform is an end-to-end technology solution that powers retailers across all aspects of their business. The company's offerings are modular, allowing retail partners to pick and choose which technologies best fit their needs. These solutions work seamlessly together, so retailers can more efficiently integrate with Instacart than they can with multiple separate technologies. Key components of Instacart Enterprise Platform include:
eCommerce: The company powers e-Commerce storefronts for more than 600 retail banners and services as of December 31, 2024, from product discovery tools, to merchandising, to different payment models, to loyalty-as-a-service.
Fulfillment: The company helps retailers fulfill grocery orders directly from their stores through its community of dedicated shoppers. Retailers — from national and regional retailers to local mainstays — can leverage its fulfillment API to help fulfill orders that are placed through their owned and operated online storefronts. In most instances, Instacart shoppers pick, pack, and delivers these orders, but retailers can also use the company’s technology to enable orders that are picked and packed by their own employees or use a combination of the two.
Connected Stores: Instacart helps retailers create a unified, seamless, and personalized experience across their online and in-store footprints by leveraging technologies like Caper Carts, Carrot Tags, Eversight, FoodStorm, In-Store mode, Out of Stock Insights, and Storefront.
Ads and Marketing: Carrot Ads, the company’s enterprise ads offering, brings the best of Instacart Ads to retailers owned and operated online storefronts and apps. The company’s retail partners can also utilize its suite of marketing solutions, from self-serve tools to fully customized strategic partnerships, to grow their business by serving targeted promotions to customers.
Insights: Insights gives retailers near real-time visibility into key metrics like item popularity, inventory levels and availability, order sizes, delivery times, delivery ratings, and sales, which enables retailers to optimize operations and provide better customer experiences.
Instacart Ads
Instacart Ads combines the best of digital advertising — precision, actionability, and measurability — with the ability to directly move products off the shelves at stores, getting these products into the hands of customers within hours. Because it offers brands a way to reach customers at the point of purchase and within minutes of delivery and consumption, the company’s solution delivers highly measurable and strong ROI across all parts of the customer shopping journey, from awareness to consideration to purchase. The company has a wide breadth of advertising solutions, including Sponsored Product ads, display ads, coupons, and brand pages, to meet all of its brand partners’ needs. Instacart Ads also enables brands to learn more about general consumer behavior from discovery to purchase, offering valuable insights about how to optimize their advertising spend.
Sales and Marketing
While the company's brand and leading market position enable it to benefit from organic, word-of-mouth growth, it uses sales and marketing to attract retailers, customers, brands, and shoppers, and grow the pie for all of its constituents. The company's marketing strategy includes consumer marketing, retail partnerships, brand partnerships, and shopper marketing. Consumer marketing includes digital marketing campaigns across a variety of platforms and channels, referral coupons and incentives, and in-store marketing. The company also collaborates to run co-marketing initiatives with retailers and brands to attract new customers. Shopper marketing attracts new shoppers and retains its existing shopper base by using referral coupons, promotional campaigns, and engagement programs. As of December 31, 2024, the majority of customers had come to Instacart through organic channels.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company had approximately 692 issued patents in the United States and approximately 650 patent applications (including active Patent Cooperation Treaty applications) pending in the United States and globally.
The company has trademark rights in its name and other brand indicia; and has trademark registrations for select marks in the United States and other jurisdictions around the world. As of December 31, 2024, the company also had approximately 162 copyright registrations. The company also registers domain names for certain websites that it uses in its business, such as www.instacart.com, as well as similar variations to protect its brands and marks from cybersquatters.
Seasonality
The company experiences seasonality in both the number of orders and GTV on Instacart, as well as in its advertising and other revenue. It typically sees lower levels of order volume in the second and third quarters, resulting from lower usage of its offerings during the spring and summer months, followed by higher levels of order volume during the holiday season. In addition, the company's advertising and other revenue has historically been seasonally high in the fourth quarter and seasonally low in the first quarter (year ended December 2024) of a given year as a result of how advertisers deploy their budgets.
Government Regulation
The company’s technology, and the user data from retailers, customers, brands, and shoppers that it collects and processes to run its business, are an integral part of its business model, and as a result, its compliance with laws and regulations dealing with the collection, use, disclosure, and other processing of personal information is core to its strategy to improve its technology and user experience. Regulators and legislatures around the world have adopted or proposed increasingly stringent requirements regarding the collection, use, disclosure, transfer, security, storage, destruction, and other processing of personal information and other data. Regulators and private litigants are more actively enforcing these requirements and violating them carries substantial penalties. Examples of such laws include the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, Section 5 of the FTC Act, and related state laws, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and various state privacy acts, including the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, and the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. In addition, expanding the company’s business to European markets would subject it to some of the world’s most stringent data protection laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union and United Kingdom, which could limit its ability to do business in those markets.
History
Maplebear Inc. was founded in 2012. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2012.