Dive Brief:

• Instacart has named technology entrepreneur Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO of enterprise software specialist Snowflake, to its board of directors, the e-commerce company announced on Thursday.
• Slootman, a Dutch-born billionaire who has led three companies onto the stock market during the past 14 years, is the latest in a string of recent high-profile additions to Instacart’s board and its executive suite.
• ​Instacart has been rapidly building its base of technology industry expertise as the company continues to raise money and expand its influence across the retail landscape.

Dive Insight:

Slootman’s appointment to Instacart’s board is another sign of the rapid progress by the company in its effort to join the senior ranks of the technology industry.

Perhaps most significantly, Slootman has deep expertise in helping companies navigate the process of going through an initial public offering — a step Instacart is widely expected to take in the coming months. In September, he led Snowflake onto the stock market in an IPO that saw the data-storage company’s stock price more than double on the company's first day of trading, helping it achieve a market capitalization more than five times the $12.4 billion it was valued at when it brought in an investment round in February 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Instacart has also seen its valuation quickly increase. Earlier this month, the company, which works with almost 600 retailers, brought in $265 million in private funding at a $39 billion valuation, more than doubling its value when it closed a round of funding in October.

Prior to joining Snowflake in 2019, Slootman was president and CEO of ServiceNow, a cloud computing company where he scaled annual revenue from $100 million to $1.4 billion and led an IPO. Before that, Slootman was president and CEO of Data Domain, a data backup company he ran as it went public. Data Domain later became part of Dell Technologies' EMC unit.

Slootman is “one of the most accomplished and respected technology CEOs operating today, and has a proven track record of building leading teams and executing at scale in fast-growing markets,” Instacart said in a statement.

Instacart has been busy bringing on people with experience at high-profile technology companies. The addition of Slootman to its board follows its February announcement that Fidji Simo, who heads the team behind Facebook’s app, and Barry McCarthy, former chief financial officer for Spotify and Netflix, would become directors. McCarthy developed a technique for enabling a company to go public without selling any new shares and allowing investors to determine its stock price, Recode reported.

Instacart has also hired executives with experience at companies including Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn and YouTube, and last week hired Daniel Danker, who had served as head of product of Uber Eats, as a vice president.

In January, the company named Nick Giovanni, who as a Goldman Sachs investment banker was involved in the IPOs of Twitter, eBay and Dropbox, as its chief financial officer.