DoorDash said on Thursday that it had agreed to buy Instacart for $17 billion, in a deal that would fold the nation’s dominant grocery delivery app into the company that already controls most of America’s restaurant takeout orders.
Together, the companies would dominate the business of bringing dinner and groceries to Americans’ doors. Under the terms of the agreement, Instacart shareholders would receive $65 per share, mostly in cash, 11 percent over the company’s closing price on Wednesday. The deal has been approved by both companies’ boards.
In the third quarter, DoorDash said it completed 993 million orders, up 28 percent from a year earlier, as customers spent nearly $34 billion. The company brought in $4.6 billion in revenue. Instacart’s latest results, for the second quarter, showed that it handled 90.3 million orders worth about $10.4 billion, generating revenue of just over $1 billion. Both companies have headquarters in San Francisco.
The takeover is DoorDash’s largest to date, surpassing its roughly $8 billion buyout of Finnish food-delivery company Wolt and its acquisition of Deliveroo, a British rival. It was also a striking turn for Instacart, which was valued at $39 billion by private investors during the pandemic grocery boom and went public in 2023 at $30 a share. With a market capitalization of around $14 billion, Instacart has since come under mounting pressure from larger rivals moving onto its turf.
DoorDash, with a market capitalization of around $72 billion, has been one of the main sources of that pressure. Last year, it began offering full grocery delivery from nearly 2,700 Kroger-owned stores nationwide, an announcement that sent Instacart’s stock tumbling. That year, DoorDash also added Family Dollar and dozens of other grocery partners.
For DoorDash, the deal offers a shortcut to scale in a category where orders are large and potentially more profitable than a single restaurant meal. Instacart brings relationships with more than 2,200 retailers.
The deal also reflects how crowded the field has become. Amazon expanded same-day delivery of perishable groceries to roughly 2,300 cities in 2025, while Walmart and Uber have pushed aggressively into grocery delivery as well.
Instacart was a hot start-up to rise from the 2010s class of “on-demand” apps that provided anything a customer wanted, from warm cookies and cannabis to carwashes and manicures, at the tap of their phones. Many of the well-funded start-ups from that era went away after they were unable to turn a profit with their business model, which relied on armies of independent contractors, or “gig workers.”
Those that remained consolidated. Uber acquired Postmates. Wonder Group bought Grubhub.
Uber and DoorDash had entertained buying Instacart at various points over the years, including in 2021 as the company was coming down from a surge in pandemic growth. But the deals fell apart and Instacart’s co-founder and chief executive, Apoorva Mehta, left the company. Instacart went public in 2023 with a pitch that it had expanded beyond its cash-burning grocery delivery business and into more profitable areas like advertising and software.
(Meredith Kopit Levien, The New York Times Company’s chief executive, sits on Instacart’s board.)
Erin Griffith contributed reporting.
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