Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Grocery Delivery Service Instacart Raises $220 Million

From the San Jose Mercury-News' SiliconBeat:
Instacart, the scrappy grocery delivery service challenging AmazonFresh, revealed on Tuesday that it has raised up to $220 million, a boost for the quick-growing startup that has so far proven the throngs of grocery delivery naysayers very wrong.

The big investment, led by Kleiner Perkins, values San Francisco-based Instacart at an estimated $2 billion — the same market cap as San Jose data storage firm Nutanix, which is expected to go public next year, and just trailing San Francisco-based Box’s $2.4 billion valuation.

About six months ago, Instacart raised $44 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Sam Altman, among others, at a reported $400 million valuation. The latest funding round reveals just how quickly the startup has grown: It has added new grocery retailers to its app, and has a new partnership with Whole Foods in which Instacart workers are stationed inside the grocery store to shop for and bag food, preparing deliveries for the Instacart driver and expediting the entire process.

Instacart told the New York Times recently that it is poised to generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014, 10 times what it did in 2013. Founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta told this newspaper in a 2013 interview that the company was making “tens of millions of dollars in revenue” a year after its 2012 launch.
It is also looking to expand into other categories beyond groceries....MORE
Taxi service?