Instacart adds former CFO, COO to board

Dive Brief:

Instacart announced Friday that Ravi Gupta, partner at Sequoia Capital, has joined the company’s board of directors.
The appointment of Gupta, who previously served as Instacart’s CFO and chief operating officer, follows the exit of the company’s co-founder and former CEO Apoorva Mehta, who has served as chairperson of the board since 2022.
With Mehta’s departure, which took effect on Sept. 19, Fortune reported, CEO Fidji Simo has now become chair of the board.

Dive Insight:

Following its public market debut, Instacart has refreshed its board of directors with the planned departure of Mehta.

Ravi Gupta.

Courtesy of Instacart

Instacart said in its announcement that Gupta is “a seasoned technology executive with more than 20 years of experience in business operations and finance.” Gupta spent a decade at global investment firm KKR and also worked as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company. He then served as Instacart’s CFO from 2015 to 2019 and its chief operating officer from 2016 to 2019. Afterward, he joined Sequoia Capital, where he focuses on consumer, mobile/internet and fintech investments.

“In addition to being a world class operator and strategist, Ravi is also uniquely attuned to Instacart’s business, with a deep understanding of the company’s business model, economics, partnerships, and vision,” Simo said in the announcement, adding that he is “steeped in experience with Instacart and the broader grocery industry.”

With a 15% stake on a fully diluted basis, Sequoia is Instacart’s largest investor, CNBC reported. Sequoia was one of the investors in a $265 million funding round in 2021 that more than doubled Instacart’s valuation to $39 billion. Sequoia was among the venture firms that took a financial hit when Instacart’s public market debut on Tuesday put its valuation at $9.9 billion on a fully diluted basis — a more than 75% drop from its previous valuation estimate in 2021.

Instacart's stock on the Nasdaq, which the company initially priced at $30 per share, opened at $42 on Tuesday and ended at $29.91 Friday, per Yahoo! Finance.

Along with Gupta and Simo, Instacart's board includes:

Barry McCarthy, Peloton's president and CEO,
Daniel Sundheim, D1 Capital Partners’ founder and CIO,
Frank Slootman, Snowflake’s chairman and CEO,
Michael Moritz, senior advisor to Sequoia Heritage,
Jeff Jordan, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz,
Meredith Kopit Levien, The New York Times Company president and CEO,
Lily Sarafan, TheKey’s co-founder and executive chair.

Mehta, a former Amazon supply chain engineer, helped start Instacart in 2012 and served as its CEO for nine years. In August 2021, Mehta became executive board chairman when the company brought in former Facebook executive Fidji Simo to replace him as CEO.

Last summer, the company said Mehta would leave Instacart once it went public and that Simo would become the board’s chair upon his departure.