An empty refrigerator. That¡¯s all it took to change Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta¡¯s life after failing with 20 startup ideas.
The son of immigrant parents, who went from India to Libya and Canada, 37-year-old Mehta is a newly-minted billionaire worth a staggering $1.3 billion, while the company he founded, Instacart¡ªthanks to the inspiration he found from an empty refrigerator¡ªis worth $12 billion.
Mehta is the founder of Instacart, a grocery delivery platform with over 7.7 million users and a network of over 80,000 stores in the US, and, until yesterday, served as the company¡¯s chairman. Instacart went public on September 18 after a $9.9 billion IPO in the US and since then has rallied to be valued at over $12 billion.
¡°More than a decade ago, I was sitting in my apartment in San Francisco bemoaning the fact that the only thing I had in my refrigerator was hot sauce,¡± Mehta wrote on LinkedIn soon after his company went public through IPO this week, as per Forbes. ¡°Don¡¯t get me wrong, I love hot sauce, but you can¡¯t exactly make it a meal.¡±
That¡¯s how Instacart was born, with the idea to help millions like Mehta shop for groceries from the comfort of their homes. ¡°My empty refrigerator was an ongoing problem¡ªand a source of inspiration,¡± Mehta adds. ¡°It was 2012 and I could shop for everything online, except groceries. That was a lightbulb moment for me, and I got started coding the first version of the Instacart app.¡±
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In Instacart's early days, Mehta, who did not own a car, made the deliveries himself via Uber. Since then, the company has grown with over 600,000 such shoppers and, over the years has had a phenomenal run, especially during the pandemic, raising billions from investors, including the likes of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and PepsiCo.
Instacart wasn¡¯t Mehta¡¯s first tryst with building his venture. A former employee at Amazon, Qualcomm, and Blackberry, with an engineering degree from the University of Waterloo, he had already tried building some 20 different ideas before starting Instacart from his kitchen. That included a product focussed on social networking for lawyers.
In 2010,?Apoorva Mehta?was working as a supply chain engineer for Amazon in Seattle but wanted to become an entrepreneur. He quit his job and moved to San Francisco, where he tried his hand at a number of startups.
¡°The reason why I quit my job at Amazon was because I wanted to become an entrepreneur,¡± Mehta said. ¡°I didn¡¯t know what my idea was going to be.¡±
¡°Grocery is the largest category in all of retail, with an annual spend of approximately $1.1 trillion in the United States in 2022,¡± Instacart said in its prospectus filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Despite the size, Instacart says only 12 percent of US grocery shopping took place online compared to 66 percent of consumer electronics, 38 percent of apparel, 23 percent of consumer food service, and 20 percent of home goods.
Instacart, which was once valued at over $39 billion after various funding rounds in the private markets pre-IPO, had priced its IPO at $30 per share as it went public on September 19,? before a 12% rally on the stock sent its market capitalisation to over $11 billion, as per the Forbes report. ¡°While this is an important milestone, the work Instacart is (doing is) only just beginning. I can¡¯t wait to see how the team continues to transform the grocery industry.¡±
However, the next day,?Instacart shares saw an 11% plunge on the second day of trading wiping out almost all of its IPO gains.
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After the blockbuster IPO, billionaire Mehta left the board handing over his charge to Simo, even though he will remain the largest individual shareholder with a 10 percent stake. ¡°A lot of people have said that perhaps I was pushed out of the company,¡± Mehta told Forbes. ¡°The reality is, if I wanted to be the CEO of Instacart, I would be the CEO of Instacart.¡±
The 37-year-old will instead turn his attention to his newly-founded company, Cloud Health Systems, which aims to address obesity through a service it recently launched, known as Sunrise. The health-tech startup has already raised $42 million from investors, including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and General Catalyst. It was valued at $200 million in a November 2022 financing round.
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