DoorDash buying Instacart for $17B

DoorDash announced Thursday it will acquire Instacart, buying the grocery delivery company for around $17 billion.

Instacart will keep its brand name, and customers will be able to continue using the app for their grocery shopping orders, DoorDash said in a statement . The acquisition received unanimous approval from Instacart’s board of directors.

The deal will allow for Instacart users to shop at an additional 50,000 stores on top of the nearly 100,000 stores already accessible through its platform, according to DoorDash. DashPass and Instacart+ memberships will merge together, but shoppers will only have to pay the price of one.

Instacart CEO Chris Rogers said the company “has transformed online grocery by helping retailers of all sizes compete and grow, and joining forces with DoorDash allows us to do even more.”

“Together, we can accelerate innovation across the grocery industry and make online grocery more seamless and affordable for the millions of households we serve,” he said in DoorDash’s statement.

Both companies run on independent contractors collecting and delivering preselected grocery shopping orders, with access to various grocery and convenience store chains. DoorDash’s partnerships with stores expanded last year after agreeing to list Kroger’s full inventory of 2,700 U.S. stores, as well as last month after agreeing to deliver products from Costco.

“Grocery is one of the hardest things to get right online,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said in the statement. “Someone has to pick a ripe avocado, find a substitute you’d choose yourself, and get the ice cream to you before it melts. Together, we could give stores of every size more of those tools and unlock the potential of grocery delivery.”

DoorDash expanded to delivering groceries in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic after serving as a restaurant order-delivery business. It completed 3 billion orders in 2025, with 9 million independent workers carrying out deliveries.

Last month, it agreed to pay $115 million to 260,000-plus workers it either did not pay at all or paid late as part of a settlement with New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The settlement was in connection with claims that DoorDash underpaid its workers.

DoorDash acknowledged that it “screwed up” while it denied that payment errors were intentional.