DoorDash Buys Instacart for 17 Billion Dollars: The App for Restaurant Lunches Now Wants to Fill Your Fridge Too

DoorDash, the restaurant food delivery app, is buying rival Instacart, the online grocery delivery service. The deal is worth 17 billion dollars (about 14.7 billion euros), or 65 dollars per Instacart share. Both companies' boards have already approved it.

Instacart's market value is just over 13 billion dollars, and its stock is up 25 percent since the start of the year. So DoorDash is paying a premium of several billion, and Instacart is selling while the price is high, before competition in grocery delivery gets even more brutal. According to Bloomberg, Instacart had also been in talks with Uber but pulled out of those negotiations.

Tony Xu, DoorDash's CEO, is selling the deal with an avocado. "Groceries are one of the hardest things to do well online," he says. "Someone has to pick a ripe avocado, find a replacement they'd choose themselves, and get the ice cream there before it melts." Instacart's chief, Chris Rogers, points out that the company has spent 14 years helping stores "of all sizes" compete.

The plan is for the Instacart brand and app to stay, along with its tech products for retailers. Stores could use Instacart's software to build their own online shops and advertising businesses, and use DoorDash couriers to deliver more cheaply. Xu wrapped up with "when more people shop locally, more money stays local" - a line that sounds odd coming from a platform that takes a cut of every order between the shopper and the store. And when both the software and the delivery are in the same hands, who writes the terms for the supermarket?

There's time before the real merger: the deal is expected to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028, and until then the two companies operate separately. A year and a half is long enough for US regulators to ask what it means when delivering both your lunch and your weekly shop ends up with one company. Will they ask - or will the promise of money that "stays local" be enough for them?