DoorDash Makes It Official: $17 Billion for Instacart, and Grocery Delivery Just Got a Lot Less Crowded

On October 29, DoorDash made official what had been rumored since the start of the week: it is acquiring Instacart in a deal worth roughly $17 billion, paying $65 a share for a grocery delivery rival whose stock had already climbed 25% this year. The boards of both companies signed off, which is a meaningfully bigger commitment than the “advanced talks” Reuters described just days earlier.

The headline question for anyone who has two subscriptions and one stomach: will DoorDash just fold Instacart into itself? Not yet, and maybe not ever. DoorDash says it plans to keep Instacart's brand, its enterprise technology products, and its app running as is, with the two companies operating independently until the deal closes, which isn’t expected until late 2027 or sometime in the first half of 2028. That’s a long runway for regulators, and for Instacart CEO Chris Rogers, who framed the sale as a continuation rather than a surrender: “Over the last 14 years, Instacart has transformed online grocery by helping retailers of all sizes compete and grow.” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu was blunter about why he wanted in: “Grocery is one of the hardest things to get right online.”

The deal also closes the book on a subplot that had Instacart reportedly talking to Uber before walking away, and it reshapes the competitive map that DoorDash now has to defend against Walmart and Amazon's own delivery ambitions. Scale is the entire argument here, and $17 billion is what DoorDash decided scale was worth.

Source: TechCrunch

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →