The San Francisco grocery-delivery company has hired bankers and held early talks with DoorDash after Uber walked away, according to reports, as slowing growth and a friendlier antitrust climate reshape the delivery business.
Instacart, the San Francisco grocery-delivery company that went public three years ago, is exploring a sale and has held preliminary talks with DoorDash, The Information reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
The company, which trades as Maplebear Inc., has hired an investment bank to advise it, according to the report. Bloomberg News separately reported that Instacart had also approached Uber Technologies, which walked away, and that the two companies are no longer in talks, according to Bloomberg Law. No deal is assured, and the discussions were described as early.
Investors did not wait for details. Instacart shares rose 9.2 percent to $56.44 on Friday, while Uber closed down about 3 percent and DoorDash about 4 percent. Instacart declined to comment to Reuters and to TechCrunch.
What a deal might cost
Reuters put Instacart’s market value at about $12 billion as of Thursday’s close, before the report; TechCrunch said Friday’s rally lifted it above $13 billion, with the stock up about 25 percent this year. A typical acquisition premium of 30 to 40 percent would imply a price of roughly $16 billion to $17 billion, according to The Information’s analysis as cited by Reuters.
That would be a fraction of what the company was once thought to be worth. In 2021, at the height of pandemic-era delivery demand, DoorDash held talks that valued Instacart at $40 billion to $50 billion, Reuters reported, citing The Information. Those talks foundered in part over antitrust concerns during the Biden administration. Instacart went public in September 2023 at $30 a share.
The numbers that matter most to a buyer are less flattering than the stock chart. Instacart’s revenue growth slowed to 11 percent in both 2024 and 2025, down from 19 percent in 2023, according to PYMNTS, which cited The Information. Over the same stretch, DoorDash grew 28 percent and Uber 18 percent. Instacart’s second-quarter revenue rose 14 percent to about $1 billion, and it generated $480 million in free cash flow, PYMNTS reported — evidence of a profitable business, if not a fast-growing one.
Squeezed from two sides
Analysts say the company’s problem is position, not profitability. Large grocers have spent years building their own apps and delivery operations, reducing their dependence on a middleman, while Amazon now promises grocery delivery in as little as 30 minutes in some markets. Instacart, for its part, cut the minimum order for free delivery on its Instacart+ membership to $10 last year to keep customers from drifting.
“Instacart risks getting squeezed between retailers building their own digital channels and larger platforms that can bundle grocery with other services, giving consumers more reasons to keep coming back,” Zak Stambor, a senior analyst at eMarketer, said in comments reported by Reuters.
“For Instacart, a deal could provide the resources and reach to compete more effectively than it could on its own,” Mr. Stambor added.
That logic explains DoorDash’s interest. DoorDash already sells groceries and convenience goods alongside restaurant meals, and absorbing Instacart’s retailer relationships, its advertising business and its shopper network would give it a dominant position in on-demand grocery. Uber has been on its own buying spree: in July it struck a deal worth nearly $15 billion for Germany’s Delivery Hero, Reuters reported.
A different antitrust climate
The question that killed the 2021 talks — whether regulators would allow the largest delivery companies to combine — now has a different answer, at least in tone. Mr. Stambor said the Trump administration has shown “greater willingness” to approve large deals than its predecessor, though he cautioned that approval “could come at the cost of selling off parts of the business.”
A DoorDash-Instacart combination would still invite scrutiny. The two companies compete directly for grocery orders, for retail partners and for the same pool of gig workers, and regulators would likely examine whether a merged company could dictate terms to grocers or to shoppers. What the numbers leave out is how much of Instacart’s value lies in businesses — advertising and the software it licenses to retailers — that a buyer might be asked to spin off.
The Bay Area stakes
For San Francisco, the talks are another chapter in the consolidation of the region’s gig-economy generation. Instacart, founded in 2012, is headquartered in the city; DoorDash is based in San Francisco as well, and Uber’s headquarters sits in Mission Bay. A sale to DoorDash would fold one of the city’s few remaining independent consumer-tech public companies into a larger local rival.
It would also touch thousands of California workers. Instacart’s shoppers in the state are classified as independent contractors under Proposition 22, the 2020 ballot measure that Instacart, DoorDash and Uber jointly financed. Any combination would put more of that workforce under a single company’s app, and the terms that come with it.
Instacart is run by Chris Rogers, who became chief executive last year after Fidji Simo left to lead applications at OpenAI. Neither the company nor DoorDash has publicly confirmed the talks.
Wendell Yamashiro covers business, technology, labor, trade and the Bay Area economy for Trade and Commerce. More from Wendell Yamashiro
