DoorDash to acquire Instacart in $17 billion grocery delivery deal

DoorDash said Thursday it has agreed to buy Instacart for roughly $17 billion in cash and stock, combining the country's largest restaurant-delivery network with its largest dedicated online grocery platform and creating one of the biggest on-demand delivery companies in North America.

The deal, disclosed in a joint press release filed with securities regulators, ends a week of speculation that began when Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported DoorDash was in advanced talks to acquire the grocery-delivery company. Instacart's board approved the agreement unanimously, and shareholders holding about 19 percent of its outstanding stock have already committed to vote in favor.

The terms

DoorDash will pay $65.00 for each share of Instacart, the publicly traded operating name of Maplebear Inc., a 26 percent premium over Instacart's closing price on October 22, the last trading day before reports of a possible deal surfaced. The transaction values Instacart's equity at approximately $17 billion.

Instacart shareholders can elect to be paid entirely in cash, entirely in DoorDash stock at a fixed exchange ratio of 0.3372 shares, or a blend of $48.75 in cash plus 0.0843 of a DoorDash share. At least three-quarters of the total purchase price must be paid in cash under the deal's terms, laid out in the merger agreement filed as an exhibit to DoorDash's securities filing; stock consideration is capped at 25 percent of the total and will be prorated if too many shareholders choose it. DoorDash has arranged a 364-day bridge loan from JPMorgan Chase to help fund the cash portion and says the purchase is not contingent on securing financing. The company has said it intends to preserve an investment-grade credit profile as it takes on the debt.

DoorDash expects the acquisition to generate more than $500 million a year in synergies, net of new investment, though it plans to plow more than all of that figure back into the combined business in the first year before the deal becomes additive on that basis in year two.

A grocery fight that outgrew two companies

The two companies have circled each other before. DoorDash and Instacart held merger talks in 2021 at a valuation of $40 billion to $50 billion that collapsed, in part over worries that antitrust regulators under the Biden administration would block a combination of two of the largest players in food delivery. Instacart went public on its own in 2023.

This time, Instacart had also held parallel discussions with Uber before those talks lapsed, and the company's stock jumped roughly 8 percent on October 26 when news of the DoorDash talks first broke, while DoorDash shares fell about 6 percent, according to a Bloomberg report at the time. Instacart has had a new chief executive, Chris Rogers, since August 2025, when Fidji Simo left the company to run OpenAI's applications business; Simo has remained Instacart's board chair. On the DoorDash side, the pursuit comes as co-founder and chief executive Tony Xu has pushed the company to expand beyond restaurant delivery into general merchandise and grocery through its warehouse-style DashMart format.

In its own third-quarter earnings report, filed alongside the Instacart announcement, DoorDash said it is concentrating on what it calls the "atoms" side of the business — warehousing, logistics and autonomous delivery — even as it rolls out AI-driven features such as its Ask DoorDash and Text DoorDash tools and an interface built on the Model Context Protocol that lets outside AI agents place orders on its platform. For the quarter, the company reported 993 million total orders, up 28 percent from a year earlier, and revenue of $4.6 billion, up 34 percent.

"Over the last 14 years, Instacart has transformed online grocery by helping retailers of all sizes compete and grow," Chris Rogers, Instacart's chief executive, said in the companies' joint statement announcing the deal.

Xu struck a similar note in the same release, saying grocery delivery is "one of the hardest things to get right online" and that the combined company could give retail partners "more of those tools" needed to compete with larger rivals online.

Who the deal touches

Instacart's business runs through retailer partnerships rather than its own stores. The company says on its corporate site that it now provides retail technology to more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 store locations in the United States and Canada, a network that includes large grocery chains as well as regional and independent stores. Those retailers, along with the few hundred thousand independent shoppers who fulfill Instacart orders, are among the parties most directly affected by a change of ownership, though DoorDash has not detailed what, if anything, will change about Instacart's existing retailer contracts or its shopper workforce.

DoorDash itself reported more than 56 million monthly active users across its marketplaces as of December 2025, according to its most recent proxy statement, and a combined company would bring that base into closer contact with Instacart's grocery-focused user base. Consumers who already use both apps may eventually see the services combined into a single ordering experience, though neither company described specific integration plans for customers in Thursday's announcement.

What happens next

The deal still requires a vote of Instacart stockholders, expiration of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust act, and regulatory clearances in Canada and Israel, where Instacart also operates. DoorDash and Instacart said they expect the transaction to close in late 2027 or the first half of 2028, a timeline that leaves well over a year for the deal to clear antitrust review — scrutiny that sank the companies' first attempt at a merger in 2021.

DoorDash's financial advisers on the deal are Centerview Partners, as lead adviser, and J.P. Morgan Securities, with Latham & Watkins serving as legal counsel. Instacart is advised by Goldman Sachs, with Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Cooley acting as legal counsel, according to the companies' announcement. Instacart is scheduled to report its own quarterly results on November 5, which will be the first chance for the company to field analyst questions about the pending sale directly.