From the San Jose Mercury-News' SiliconBeat:
Instacart, the scrappy grocery delivery service challenging
AmazonFresh, revealed on Tuesday that it has raised up to $220 million, a
boost for the quick-growing startup that has so far proven the throngs
of grocery delivery naysayers very wrong.
The big investment, led by Kleiner Perkins, values San
Francisco-based Instacart at an estimated $2 billion — the same market
cap as San Jose data storage firm Nutanix, which is expected to go
public next year, and just trailing San Francisco-based Box’s $2.4
billion valuation.
About six months ago, Instacart raised $44 million from Andreessen
Horowitz and Sam Altman, among others, at a reported $400 million
valuation. The latest funding round reveals just how quickly the startup
has grown: It has added new grocery retailers to its app, and has a new
partnership with Whole Foods in which Instacart workers are stationed
inside the grocery store to shop for and bag food, preparing deliveries
for the Instacart driver and expediting the entire process.
Instacart told the New York Times
recently that it is poised to generate more than $100 million in
revenue in 2014, 10 times what it did in 2013. Founder and CEO Apoorva
Mehta told this newspaper in a 2013 interview that the company was making “tens of millions of dollars in revenue” a year after its 2012 launch.
It is also looking to expand into other categories beyond groceries....MORE
Taxi service?