DoorDash offers $17 billion deal to buy Instacart

(CBS) — DoorDash said Thursday that it will buy Instacart for $17 billion, uniting one of the nation’s top grocery delivery services with a major food delivery company.

DoorDash, which will pay $65 per share for Instacart, said the acquisition will benefit communities by enabling more supermarkets to use Instacart’s platform to run their websites.

“Instacart has spent years learning to do that well for grocers, while DoorDash has built a delivery network and technology that local stores rely on every day,” Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, said in a statement. “Together, we could give stores of every size more of those tools and unlock the potential of grocery delivery.”

Consumers will benefit by having more stores to choose from, speedier delivery options and access to savings when they shop locally, DoorDash also said in announcing the acquisition.

“Instacart customers could shop at more than 50,000 additional stores, on top of the nearly 100,000 stores on the Instacart platform today,” DoorDash said.

Instacart, founded in 2012, specializes in grocery and convenience store delivery in the U.S. and Canada.

DoorDash was founded a year later in San Francisco as a restaurant-delivery business and expanded into grocery delivery in 2020 amid a pandemic-induced surge in demand. The San Francisco-based company later teamed with the supermarket chain Kroger in 2022 and with Costco last month.

The deal will beef up DoorDash’s grocery delivery services, making it a more potent competitor to Amazon and Walmart.

DoorDash’s most recent earnings report, released on Wednesday, shows its revenue grew 34% from a year ago.

Its total number of orders rose 28%, a sign the company is continuing to grow in the highly competitive delivery business.

By the end of 2024, DoorDash held nearly 61% of the food delivery market share, topping Uber Eats and Grubhub, which held around 26% and 6%, respectively, according to Consumer Edge.