Instacart valuation hits $7.6B Following $600M round; Amazon removes Instacart branding at Whole Foods

(GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong) Instacart’s evaluation just totaled to $7.6 billion because the supermarket delivery giant declared a brand new $600 million investment round on Tuesday headed by D1 Capital Partners. The investment carries a different $350 million roughly that Instacart reeled in before this season. The Bay Area business has now raised $1.6 billion since launching six years ago.   We think we’re in the very early phases of a huge change in the way that people buy groceries and we expect that one in five Americans will be shopping for their groceries on the web in the next five decades. “The U.S. is nearly a trillion supermarket market, and last year we watched almost every significant grocer in North America earn their delivery company online in a substantial manner,” Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said in a declaration. “We think we’re in the very early phases of a huge change in the way that people buy markets and we expect that one in five Americans will be shopping for their groceries online in the next five decades.” Instacart now has 300 retail associates, operating together with 15,000 grocery stores around 4,000 cities, and has 50,000 builders who look for groceries. It employs 600 people. Since the statement of Amazon’s blockbuster acquisition of Whole Foods last year, grocers reckoning with the alliance have been driven into the arms of Instacart, that has signed up or expanded partnerships with several top grocers in the U.S., such as Albertsons, Kroger, H-E-B, Sam’s Club, Aldi, and many lately Walmart Canada. “Freight is your largest category within U.S. retail plus it’s also among the least penetrated on line,” Dan Sundheim, creator of D1 Capital Partners, said in a statement. “The business is at a tipping point and there will likely be a significant stride in the adoption of online ordering for supermarket delivery over the upcoming few decades. We feel that traditional retailers will direct the category on the internet, as their brick and mortar stores are the best distribution centers for pleasure of online grocery orders.” Chart via CBInsights. Amazon, meanwhile, continues to expand its grocery delivery service from Whole Foods Market, now available in 48 cities across the U.S. for Prime members. Amazon has also started rolling supermarket store from Whole Foods. The purchase set the association between Instacart and Whole Foods in an odd spot. The companies inked a documented 5-year partnership in 2016; Whole Foods additionally invested in Instacart at the time. The shipping partnership remains continuing — delivery.wholefoodsmarket.com sends clients to Instacart — but Amazon was distancing itself from Instacart after buying Whole Foods. Bloomberg reported in March the Instacart delivery builders were”shunted into a corridor upstairs” in a San Francisco store as Amazon made space for its own employees. At the Whole Foods location in Seattle’s Roosevelt area, Instacart branding was removed from the shipping freezer. The very first photograph below is in August 2017, only after Amazon completed the purchase –“Constructed by Instacart,” the decal reads. The next photo is out of this week. We reached out to Amazon for remark on the Whole Foods-Instacart partnership and will update this story when we hear back. Mehta talked about Amazon and Whole Foods at a recent Recode event.  He would not comment on if Amazon was violating any present contracts with Instacart. “It is very important to place these news stories in perspective — Whole Foods is approximately 1.5% of the total supermarket,” Mehta explained. “Most Americans don’t shop at Whole Foods. The merchants that many Americans shop at are spouses with Instacart.”

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