Fidji Simo, chief executive officer of Instacart Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Studio 1.0 interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, March 3, 2022.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Instacart, the grocery-delivery company that saw its business boom during the pandemic, priced its long-awaited IPO at $30 a share on Monday, and will become the first notable venture-backed tech company to hit the U.S. public market since December 2021.
The offering came in at the top end of the expected range of $28 to $30 a share, and values Instacart at about $10 billion on a fully diluted basis.There were 22 million shares sold in the initial public offering, with 14.1 million coming from the company and 7.9 million from existing shareholders. The stock is set to debut on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Tuesday under ticker symbol “CART.”
The 11-year-old company, which delivers groceries from chains including Kroger, Costco and Wegmans, had to drop its stock price dramatically to make it appealing for public market investors. In early 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Instacart raised money at a $39 billion valuation, or $125 a share, from prominent venture firms like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, along with big asset managers Fidelity and T. Rowe Price.
The tech IPO market has been largely shuttered since December 2021, as inflationary pressures and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risk and led to a plunge in the prices of internet and software stocks. Instacart’s performance, along with the upcoming debut of cloud software vendor Klaviyo, could help determine if other billion-dollar-plus companies in the pipeline are willing to test the waters.
Instacart has sacrificed growth for profitability, proving in the process that its business model can generate earnings. Revenue increased 15% in the second quarter to $716 million, down from growth of 40% in the year-earlier period and about 600% in the early months of the pandemic. The company reduced headcount in mid-2022 and lowered costs associated with customer and shopper support.
Instacart started generating earnings in the second quarter of 2022, and in the latest quarter reported $114 million in net income, up from $8 million a year prior.
At $10 billion, Instacart will be valued at about 3.5 times annual revenue. Food-delivery provider DoorDash, which Instacart names as a competitor in its prospectus, trades at 4.25 times revenue. DoorDash’s revenue in the latest quarter grew faster, at 33%, but the company is still losing money. Uber’s stock trades for less than 3 times revenue. The ride-sharing company’s Uber Eats business is also named as an Instacart competitor.
The bulk of Instacart’s competition is coming from Amazon as well as big brick-and-mortar retailers, like Target and Walmart, which have their own delivery services. Target acquired Shipt in 2017 for $550 million.
Sequoia is Instacart’s biggest investor, with a fully diluted stake of 15%. While the Silicon Valley firm is sitting on a paper profit of over $1 billion on its total investment, the $50 million in shares it purchased in 2021 are now worth about one-quarter that amount.
Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta owns shares worth over $800 million, and is selling a small portion of them in the IPO. Mehta has been executive chair since the company appointed ex-Facebook executive Fidji Simo as his successor as CEO in 2021. Mehta is resigning from the board in conjunction with the IPO, and Simo is assuming the role of chair.
Only about 8% of Instacart’s outstanding shares were floated in the offering, with 36% of those sold coming from existing shareholders. The company said co-founders Brandon Leonardo and Maxwell Mullen are each selling 1.5 million, while Mehta is selling 700,000. Former employees, including those who were in executive roles as well as in product and engineering, are selling a combined 3.2 million shares.
Inside a secretive set of buildings in Santa Barbara, California, scientists at Alphabet are working on one of the company’s most ambitious bets yet. They’re attempting to develop the world’s most advanced quantum computers.
“In the future, quantum and AI, they could really complement each other back and forth,” said Julian Kelly, director of hardware at Google Quantum AI.
Google has been viewed by many as late to the generative AI boom, because OpenAI broke into the mainstream first with ChatGPT in late 2022.
Late last year, Google made clear that it wouldn’t be caught on the backfoot again. The company unveiled a breakthrough quantum computing chip called Willow, which it says can solve a benchmark problem unimaginably faster than what’s possible with a classical computer, and demonstrated that adding more quantum bits to the chip reduced errors exponentially.
“That’s a milestone for the field,” said John Preskill, director of the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. “We’ve been wanting to see that for quite a while.”
Willow may now give Google a chance to take the lead in the next technological era. It also could be a way to turn research into a commercial opportunity, especially as AI hits a data wall. Leading AI models are running out of high-quality data to train on after already scraping much of the data on the internet.
“One of the potential applications that you can think of for a quantum computer is generating new and novel data,” said Kelly.
He uses the example of AlphaFold, an AI model developed by Google DeepMind that helps scientists study protein structures. Its creators won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
“[AlphaFold] trains on data that’s informed by quantum mechanics, but that’s actually not that common,” said Kelly. “So a thing that a quantum computer could do is generate data that AI could then be trained on in order to give it a little more information about how quantum mechanics works.”
Kelly has said that he believes Google is only about five years away from a breakout, practical application that can only be solved on a quantum computer. But for Google to win the next big platform shift, it would have to turn a breakthrough into a business.
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
An employee walks past a quilt displaying Etsy Inc. signage at the company’s headquarters in the Brooklyn.
Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Etsy is trying to make it easier for shoppers to purchase products from local merchants and avoid the extra cost of imports as President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs raise concerns about soaring prices.
In a post to Etsy’s website on Thursday, CEO Josh Silverman said the company is “surfacing new ways for buyers to discover businesses in their countries” via shopping pages and by featuring local sellers on its website and app.
“While we continue to nurture and enable cross-border trade on Etsy, we understand that people are increasingly interested in shopping domestically,” Silverman said.
Etsy operates an online marketplace that connects buyers and sellers with mostly artisanal and handcrafted goods. The site, which had 5.6 million active sellers as of the end of December, competes with e-commerce juggernaut Amazon, as well as newer entrants that have ties to China like Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop.
By highlighting local sellers, Etsy could relieve some shoppers from having to pay higher prices induced by President Trump’s widespread tariffs on trade partners. Trump has imposed tariffs on most foreign countries, with China facing a rate of 145%, and other nations facing 10% rates after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations. Trump also signed an executive order that will end the de minimis provision, a loophole for low-value shipments often used by online businesses, on May 2.
Temu and Shein have already announced they plan to raise prices late next week in response to the tariffs. Sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, many of whom source their products from China, have said they’re considering raising prices.
Silverman said Etsy has provided guidance for its sellers to help them “run their businesses with as little disruption as possible” in the wake of tariffs and changes to the de minimis exemption.
Before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs took effect, Silverman said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in late February that he expects Etsy to benefit from the tariffs and de minimis restrictions because it “has much less dependence on products coming in from China.”
“We’re doing whatever work we can do to anticipate and prepare for come what may,” Silverman said at the time. “In general, though, I think Etsy will be more resilient than many of our competitors in these situations.”
Still, American shoppers may face higher prices on Etsy as U.S. businesses that source their products or components from China pass some of those costs on to consumers.
Etsy shares are down 17% this year, slightly more than the Nasdaq.