DoorDash Is Buying Instacart for About $17 Billion

DoorDash is buying Instacart. The two companies announced a definitive deal on October 29 that values Instacart at about $17 billion (roughly ₹1.6 lakh crore), which makes it one of the biggest consumer tech deals of the year. Rumours had been flying for a week, so the surprise isn't that it happened. It's how much of the grocery delivery market one company could now control.

What happened

According to the joint announcement, DoorDash will pay $65 for each Instacart share. That's a 26% premium over Instacart's closing price on October 22, the last trading day before media reports about a sale. Instacart shareholders can take cash, DoorDash stock or a mix, but at least 75% of the total has to be cash. DoorDash says it'll fund that with cash on hand and new debt, backed by a financing commitment from JPMorgan.

A few other details stood out to me:

• Instacart keeps its name and app. DoorDash plans to keep the Instacart brand, its app and its enterprise tech for retailers after closing.
• One membership instead of two. DashPass and Instacart+ members would pay a single fee. The companies put the savings at around $100 million a year across members.
• More stores. Instacart users could get access to more than 50,000 extra stores on top of the nearly 100,000 already on the platform.
• It won't close soon. The target is the end of 2027 or the first half of 2028, pending a shareholder vote and antitrust reviews in the US, Canada and Israel.

Instacart also put out its Q3 results the same day, with revenue up 17% year over year and $147 million in net income. It also cancelled its November 5 earnings call. Reports of a possible sale surfaced last week, and TechCrunch flagged them on X on October 24. The Verge has more on the announcement.

Why it matters

DoorDash began as a restaurant courier and Instacart owns the weekly grocery run. Put them together and you get one company with a huge share of US on-demand delivery, which goes up directly against Uber, Amazon and Walmart. That's exactly why the regulatory review is expected to drag on for a year or more.

For anyone outside the US and Canada, nothing changes right away. Neither app runs in India, for example, where Swiggy Instamart, Zepto and Blinkit fight over the same quick-commerce idea. But this deal is a decent signal of where the industry thinks the money is: groceries and retail, not just takeaway.

What to do

• Nothing yet if you use either app. Instacart told its shoppers that the two companies will run separately until the deal closes, and orders work exactly as before.
• Don't prepay for a long membership on the assumption of a bundle. The merged membership is a plan, not a product you can buy today, and regulators could still change the terms.
• If you're an Instacart shopper or Dasher, watch for official notices in the app rather than rumours on social media.