Instacart, the grocery delivery company that slashed its valuation during last year’s market slide, filed its paperwork to go public on Friday in what’s poised to be the first significant venture-backed tech IPO since December 2021.
The stock will be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “CART.” In its prospectus, the company said net income totaled $114 million, while revenue in the latest quarter hit $716 million, a 15% increase from the year-ago period. Instacart has now been profitable for five straight quarters, according to the filing. PepsiCo has agreed to purchase $175 million of the company’s stock in a private placement.
Instacart said it will continue to focus on incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning features into the platform, and that the company expects to “rely on AIML solutions to help drive future growth in our business.” In May, Instacart said it was leaning into the generative AI boom with Ask Instacart, a search tool that aims to answer customers’ grocery shopping questions.
“We believe the future of grocery won’t be about choosing between shopping online and in-store,” CEO Fidji Simo wrote in the prospectus. “Most of us are going to do both. So we want to create a truly omni-channel experience that brings the best of the online shopping experience to physical stores, and vice versa.”
Instacart will try and crack open the IPO market, which has been mostly closed since late 2021. In December of that year, software vendor HashiCorp and Samsara, which develops cloud technology for industrial companies, went public, but there haven’t been any notable venture-backed tech IPOs since. Chip designer Arm, which is owned by Japan’s SoftBank, filed for a Nasdaq listing on Monday.
Founded in 2012 and initially incorporated as Maplebear Inc., Instacart will join a crop of so-called gig economy companies on the public market, following the debut in 2020 of Airbnb and DoorDash and car-sharing companies Uber and Lyft a year earlier. They’ve not been a great bet for investors, as only Airbnb is currently trading above its IPO price.
Instacart shoppers and drivers deliver goods in over 5,500 cities from more than 40,000 grocers and other stores, according to its website. The business took off during the covid pandemic as consumers avoided public places. But profitability has always been a major challenge, as it is across much of the gig economy, because of high costs associated with paying all those contractors.
Headcount peaked in the second quarter of 2022, Instacart said, “and declined over the next two quarters, reducing our fixed operating cost base.” At the end of June, the company had 3,486 full-time employees.
In March of last year, Instacart slashed its valuation to $24 billion from $39 billion as public stocks sank. The valuation reportedly fell by another 50% by late 2022. Instacart listed Amazon, Target, Walmart and DoorDash among its competitors.
The biggest area for cost reductions has been in general and administrative expenses. Those costs shrank to $51 million in the latest quarter from $77 million a year earlier and a peak of $102 million in the final period of 2021. Instacart said the drop was the “result of lower fees related to legal matters and settlements.”
Simo took over as Instacart’s CEO in August 2021 and became chair of the company’s board in July 2022. She was previously head of Facebook’s app at Meta and reported directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Apoorva Mehta, Instacart’s founder and executive chairman, plans to transition off the board after the company’s public market debut, according to a 2022 release.
The company’s board also includes Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman and Andreessen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan.
Instacart will be one of the first independent grocery delivery companies to go public. Amazon Fresh, Walmart Grocery and Google Express are all units of large corporations. Shipt was acquired by Target in 2017 and Fresh Direct, another direct-to-consumer grocery delivery company, was bought by global food retailer Ahold Delhaize in 2021.
Sequoia Capital and DJ Capital Partners are the only shareholders owning at least 5% of the stock. Instacart said those two firms, along with Norges Bank Investment Management and entities affiliated with TCV, D1 Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Management, have “indicated an interest, severally and not jointly” in purchasing up to $400 million of shares in the IPO at the offering price.
Instacart’s move into AI has come largely through a string of acquisitions in the past two years. Those deals include the purchase of e-commerce startup Rosie, AI-powered pricing firm Eversight, AI shopping cart and checkout solutions provider Caper, and FoodStorm, a software startup specializing in self-serve kiosks for in-store customers.
The company also touted its use of machine learning in predicting grocery availability for retailers and increasing consumer sales. It said its algorithms predict availability every two hours for the “large majority” of its 1.4 billion grocery items, and that more than 70% of customers purchased items through Instacart’s recommendation algorithm in the second quarter of 2023.
Goldman Sachs is leading the offering. That’s the former employer of Instacart finance chief Nick Giovanni, who was previously global head of the tech, media and telecom group at the investment bank.
A woman holds a cell phone featuring the DeepSeek logo, with the Nvidia logo displayed in the background.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
As China and the U.S. compete in artificial intelligence, Southeast Asia should draw from the best of both countries while building its own technologies, panelists said at CNBC’s East Tech West 2025 conference on June 27 in Bangkok, Thailand.
Julian Gorman, head of Asia-Pacific at mobile network trade organization GSMA, said it would be a negative development if Southeast Asia was forced to choose between either superpower.
“Southeast Asia is very dependent on both economies, both China and America. I think it’s pretty hard to consider that they would go one way or the other,” Gorman said.
“It’s very important that we continue to focus on not fragmenting the technology, standardizing it, and working so that technology transcends geopolitics and ultimately is used for good,” he added.
The spread of U.S. and Chinese AI companies into new global markets has been a big trend this year as both Beijing and Washington seek more global influence in advanced technologies.
U.S. and China offerings
According to George Chen, managing director and co-chair of digital practice for The Asia Group, Southeast Asia had initially been leaning towards AI models from the U.S., such as those from Google and Microsoft.
However, the emergence of China’s DeepSeek has propelled the popularity of the company’s models in Southeast Asia due to its low cost and open-source licensing, which can be used to build on and adapt models to regional priorities.
Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available, allowing anyone to view, modify and redistribute it. Large language model players in China have been leaning into this business model since DeepSeek’s debut.
Previous panels at East Tech West have flagged open-source models as an important tool for regions outside of China and the U.S. to build their own sovereign AI capabilities.
Meanwhile, on the hardware side, the U.S. remains a leader in AI processors through chip giant Nvidia. While the U.S. has restricted China’s access to these chips, they remain on the market for Southeast Asia – which Chen suggested the region continue to take advantage of.
However, Chen noted that there is a possibility that the AI landscape could change dramatically in a decade, with China being able to provide more affordable alternatives to Nvidia.
“Don’t take a side easily and too quickly. Think about how to maximize your economic potential,” he suggested.
GSMA’s Gorman pointed out that facing this “balancing act” between the superpowers is not new for Southeast Asia. For example, the region’s mobility industry heavily relies on Chinese tech manufacturing and hardware, as well as the U.S. in other areas such as telecommunications.
Southeast Asia’s edge
Though the U.S. and China are clearly ahead in building advanced AI models, Southeast Asia has its own edge in the global AI space, panelists said.
“If you think about AI as a technology, eventually you need to apply it to a real product or service. That’s how people can use it,” said The Asia Group’s Chen.
The region has a strong app environment which offers “great potential,” he added. “The demographic is young, which means the potential for talent is always there, and R&D cost is relatively cheaper than other places.”
Still, Southeast Asia should aim to bring in companies with advanced capabilities that domestic industries can learn from and benefit from – a strategy that China employed to catch up to the West in advanced technologies, said Chen.
Leader in AI regulation?
According to GSMA’s Gorman, Southeast Asia can serve as a neutral ground between China and the U.S., where the two sides can come together and engage in high-level dialogues on how to apply AI responsibly.
Southeast Asia can also play a proactive role in AI regulation itself, he said, citing recent examples of regulatory leadership from the region, such as Singapore’s Shared Responsibility Framework for tackling international scams and fraud.
So far, there have been few global regulations on AI. While the EU has adopted a policy, the U.S. and ASEAN countries have yet to follow suit.
Chen added that the region will need to band together and adopt common frameworks to gain a more prominent seat at the table of global AI development and regulation.
Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.
Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.”
The post had 5.3 million views as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X as well as artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence, also published a video on X explaining the remark.
Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”
They are asking the firm for a public response by July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.
Sequoia declined to comment. Maguire didn’t respond to a request for comment, but wrote in a post about the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”
Among the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing service Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Also on the list is Abubakar Abid, who works in machine learning Hugging Face, which is backed by Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a financial technology startup that Sequoia first invested in four years ago.
At least three founders of startups that have gone through startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.
Sequoia as a firm is no stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the firm until 2022 and remains a partner, is a longtime Republican donor, who supported Trump in the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters: you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”
By contrast, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues in the tech industry for lining up behind the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters were “making a big mistake.”
“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped down from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade after giving up a management role at the firm. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”
Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages seeking comment.
Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s current lead partner, has taken a more neutral stance. Botha said at an event last July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” adding that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof said he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”
Maguire has long been open with his political views. He said on X last year that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained the ire of many people in tech and in the business community more broadly since defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.
Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia.
The memory chip and smartphone maker said in its guidance that operating profit for the quarter ending June was projected to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.
The figure is a deeper plunge compared to smart estimates from LSEG, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.
According to the smart estimates, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion)for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.
Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and is also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers.
However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.
“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.
SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.
The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.
Ray Wang, Research Director of Semiconductors, Supply Chain and Emerging Technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.
“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.
Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.
