Instacart Raises $225M At $14B Valuation

Instacart‘s valuation is now almost $14 billion after a new funding round, the company announced in a press release.

The round raised $225 million and was led by DST Global and General Catalyst. Existing investor D1 Capital Partners contributed as well. The company’s valuation is now $13.7 billion, the release states.

Instacart and other similar companies continue to receive funding as the pandemic has “changed the rhythm of life” in America and the world and “fundamentally reshaped the way people think about on-demand services like Instacart,” the release states.

The company has doubled the size of its customer base, now offering services to more than 500,000 people who need groceries delivered to their door, according to the release. Instacart is available for over 85 percent of the households in the U.S. and over 70 percent of the ones in Canada.

Instacart has also shifted to delivering alcohol and prescriptions in addition to its usual grocery deliveries.

The company said in the release that it will “deepen our support for our shopper community, further fund strategic business initiatives like Instacart Advertising and Enterprise, and continue to scale our technology and operations to meet the needs of all the communities we serve.”

The shift to services like Instacart comes as the pandemic has forced customers to take on new ways of life, with some eager to do so and others only doing it out of obligation. A PYMNTS survey of 2,064 customers found that some are using digital means for retail right now but are likely to rejoin the public sphere once it’s safer, and others, concerned with catching the virus, are likely to continue using digital products.

There are others who have shifted to digital modes of shopping due to convenience, the survey found, and others who shifted because their jobs mandated working from home during the pandemic but wish to go out again once safety is no longer a concern.