Instacart's legal name is Maplebear: maple for Canada, where Apoorva Mehta grew up, and bear for California, where he moved later. Instacart sent shoppers into local supermarkets to fill orders placed on an app. Grocers got online sales without building their own delivery. By 2023 it worked with more than 1,400 retail banners, which together made up more than 85 percent of the U.S. grocery market. Its IPO that September valued it at about $10 billion.

The Store Comes to You

Mehta, Max Mullen, and Brandon Leonardo founded Instacart in San Francisco in 2012. The bet was that people would pay to skip the grocery run, and that stores would rather partner with Instacart than fight it. Its shoppers picked from the stores' own shelves, so it needed no warehouses. In 2021 Fidji Simo became chief executive, and Mehta moved to executive chairman.

Thirty Dollars to Start

Instacart priced at $30 a share on September 18, 2023, and began trading on the Nasdaq the next day under the ticker CART. It raised $660 million and rose about 12 percent on its first day. Mehta left the board after the IPO. In 2025 Simo left for OpenAI, and Chris Rogers became chief executive. Instacart earned $450 million on $3.74 billion of revenue in 2025. It is still public on the Nasdaq.

Cover: Still Life with a Basket of Fruit and a Bunch of Asparagus, Louise Moillon. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a basket of fresh groceries.