Dive Brief:

• Instacart has appointed Rama Katkar, a corporate finance specialist with experience helping companies scale their operations, as vice president of finance, the e-commerce company announced in a blog post on Wednesday.
• Katkar most recently served as senior vice president of corporate development and strategic finance for Credit Karma, a role in which she helped the consumer technology company manage its acquisition by software developer Intuit.
• Katkar is the latest executive with experience in the technology sector to join Instacart’s senior leadership team as the rapidly growing company reportedly prepares to go public.

Dive Insight:

Instacart’s decision to hire Katkar continues its efforts to bulk up on top managers with deep experience helping steer technology companies.

Katkar is joining Instacart, where she will oversee the finance team and focus on financial planning and strategic finance, after spending nearly six years helping Credit Karma navigate the capital markets and ultimately become part of Intuit in a $4.7 billion deal that closed in December.

Before joining Credit Karma, Katkar worked in global corporate development for PayPal and co-founded SaleTally, a retail data analytics company that was purchased in 2014 by ShopperTrak, according to her LinkedIn profile. She started her career working on mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley.

At Instacart, Katkar will report to Nick Giovanni, who became the new chief financial officer on Wednesday following a two-decade career at Goldman Sachs, where he helped high-profile companies such as Twitter, eBay and Dropbox go public.

The new financial executives are joining Instacart following the company’s announcement in October that it had hired former officials of LinkedIn and YouTube to lead its human resources and advertising operations.

Katkar and Giovanni are taking on their positions as Instacart rides a wave of growth fueled by surging interest by shoppers in buying groceries online — the company’s bread and butter. Instacart, which provides e-commerce services to more than 500 food and other retailers, has recently been working to expand its pickup operations and in 2020 launched pickup service at more than 2,000 stores.

The company, which has been burnishing its profile as it prepares for a possible initial public offering and brought on hundreds of thousands of contractor workers last year amid the pandemic, now offers Instacart Pickup at more than 3,300 locations in the United States.

Even as Instacart focuses on growth, the company has also instituted cutbacks. Earlier in January, the firm said it would lay off almost 1,900 employees who pick and pack grocery orders at stores owned by Kroger and other supermarket chains during the next few months as it retools its pickup offerings.